Building your own supercomputer

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Okay I have a horse in this race but...

I just came from the BARC conference (Boston area ARChitecture, dumb acronym, good little conference) last week. We always get a higher-up rep from Intel or AMD along with the folks from the Universities around Boston-- it's a very good way to get a snapshot of where things are going (and it's cheap, $50 for the day w/ lunch & snacks).

To stop the plug, and bring it back to Paul's vision of a desktop supercomputer, The big 2 are definitely heading in the grid-on-chip direction.

I think the big question is going to be homogeneous or heterogeneous computing.

Last year, Intel's slides showed every increasing numbers of CPU cores on a chip (big surprise), and I recall some talk of an architecture consisting of many-many Floating point plus little bits of memory connected by a heavy-duty network (a la Merrimac).

This year, the AMD guy talked about many-many accelerator cores on a chip, with a less complex network. An MIT fellow gave a talk about an architecture for a contentionless optical network by integrating optical components into silicon chips. The pieces are falling into place.

check out the full scoop in the proceedings...

http://www.bu.edu/barc2007/

Both approaches still need a good programming model (or good parallel programmers. I predict the job-market for physics grads is about to take off), which is the hardest part, and where some of the work in our lab comes in. We're looking at using FPGA's for the HPC world
http://www.bu.edu/caadlab/.

The biggest challenges here are convincing the scientists they don't REALLY need floating point and memory limitations on-chip (though these are getting better).

Other folks are looking at GPUs, where the small-data-in, large-data-out and programming model for these chips are the big problem (it's hard to turn every problem into a rendering one).

I think both are viable approaches for realizing at least a piece of a desktop supercomputer, or at the least, a useful one for $10k-$20k.
--Josh

Posted by: jtmodel   Posted on: 02/01/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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