At 08:32 AM 9/29/2006, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
The above is the biggest problem. That's why you need good software that
'hides' the supercomputer. Basically they want with their windows PC start
your program (see attachment) and click somewhere and then run on a big
supercomputer (for the average guy on the street a big supercomputer is
everything that 2 hands cannot lift).
If it was possible to build your own cluster in easy manner and then run for
example a chessprogram at it in a user friendly way,
there would be 100k+ clusters right now of 64 cpu's and more.
Especially now that 1 chip hardly gets faster, we must think in
future more and more
in clustered manner.
Just doing simple math what i own myself:
1996 : 200Mhz p6
2006 : 2.4Ghz opteron
both are 3 instructions per cycle processors.
So hardware guys won exactly factor 12 in raw processing speed.
Moore's law: each 18 month doubling in transistors.
deduction from that: doubling in speed.
Would mean we are faster now a 106 times ( 2 ^ 6.66 )
So somewhere a factor 8 is missing.
The average user feels very well that there is no doubling in speed
each 18 months.
So offering solutions to normal users to get their favourite program
executed faster in an user friendly manner is definitely a big market.
And this is what companies like Orion are targeting. Specific
classes of users who need lots of computation, with a specific
program, and with $10K to $100K to spend. I don't know that there
are "consumer" applications like this yet, but in the generalized
engineering world, there are a number of finite element codes for
electromagnetics, structures, CFD, and thermal analysis that are
widely used. These codes take quite a lot of computation, so
something that is a truly "turnkey" speed up by a factor of 10 or 100
is worth it. Turns a "load and run the model overnight" kind of
operation into a "run the model while I get coffee" operation.
Jim
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