On Tuesday 21 December 2010, Arthur Corliss elucidated thus:
> On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Joshua J. Kugler wrote:
> > I don't know much about their status. Some senators (not just
> > Alaska's) are trying to insert language to keep the DoD from
> > shutting down some of its projects.
> >
> > But as to "super computers," when you can throw a few Nvidia cards
> > in a system, and smoke your university's 512 core super computer by
> > nearly 4 times, using 1/300 of the electricity...the whole concept
> > of "super computer" becomes kind of moot. Or, spin up a few
> > hundred "cloud" systems for a few hours, then shut it all down, and
> > only pay for time used.
> >
> > Super computers may still have their place, but the need for them
> > is becoming more and more niche.
>
> They more than have their place. The whole CUDA/GPU exercise is only
> applicable to a relatively small problem domain. Yes, it is
> extremely efficient for what it does, but it's all the *other* stuff
> that a super computer is capable of that makes them so valuable.
True, I forget that CUDA is pretty niche itself.
> If anything, my money's on computers at some point coming with an
> array of FPGAs standard.
That's going to be spiffy!
> BTW, x86 is still an extremely crappy architecture. If performance
> and scalability were the only criteria they'd never even be looked
> at. It's the price point of commoditized hardware that's driving any
> interest there at all.
Oh, no doubts there. I really wish PowerPC or MIPS or SPARC had taken
off, but (mostly) thanks to the Windows ecosystems, they never got good
traction.
j
-- Joshua Kugler Part-Time System Admin/Programmer http://www.eeinternet.com - Fairbanks, AK PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ ID 0x73B13B6A --------- To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.Received on Tue Dec 21 10:21:13 2010
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