On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:28:12AM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote: > - do we need exascale anyway? would the world be better off with a thousand
Yes, EFlops is entry level for projects like http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/neurologist-markam-human-brain/all/ and if you want invididually accurate neural emulation you'll need billions of such facilities, so we're looking at kW rather MW here. > petascale machines? I know the field tends to view this as a kind of > manifest destiny, but why? the secondary argument usually devolves to > something like "well, the high end pushes the envelope so the masses can > benefit from trickle-down improvements." but if this is the main > justification, it's a bit twisted: we need to make clusters so big that we > can't afford to power them in order to force ourselves to develop more > power-efficient systems? if power is an important TCO component, why aren't > we optimizing for it already (in any sized facility)? I definitely do for my private projects, as 0.25 EUR/kWh are a pretty good argument. _______________________________________________ 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
