On 10/11/2012 12:37 AM, Mark Hahn wrote: >> Any general purpose system will inevitably underperform for some people, >> and many might argue that the art of managing such a project is making sure >> everyone squawks equally loud about how the stake is being driven into their >> heart. > I think of it from the other direction: a specialized machine would need > to demonstrate really significant savings.
This is the logic behind DE Shaw's Anton computer for molecular dynamics, except instead of saving money, the item being saved is time. In their papers they argue that designing the unique processors for the Anton put them 5 years ahead of waiting for general-purpose processors to achieve the same performance. Of course, money was not a concern. This whole discussion of the K computers practicality reminds me of autoracing. The saying is "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday", with the logic that winning on Sunday will boost car sales for the "brand" that one on the following Monday. The other argument is that the racing competition spurs engineering advances that trickles down to passenger cars. And we all know that cars that race on Sunday, whether Indy Car, Formula 1, NASCAR, or whatever, don't make good passenger cars or pickups, and are actually illegal to use on streets. IMHO, the only computer companies doing the "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" thing right are the companies like Intel and IBM, and Mellanox. These companies have many products in the top 500, but are also available to the "general public" (in quotes because I'm not sure you can call cluster purchasers the general public), and make enough money to fund their own R&D. While supercomputers like the K are awesome feats of engineering, if those innovations don't trickle down into products with more widespread availability, I have to wonder what's in it for the company and the rest of the world (other than government grants keeping them afloat, which isn't a great business model in the end)? I hope I didn't go too far off-topic just then. -- Prentice _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
