> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/26.full?rss=1 ... > Interesting claim. What kind of architecture structure would benefit > Linpack and would hinder real-world applications?
my guess is they don't like vector. the quote appears to be from Jun Makino, the GRAPE guy (so qualifies as "sour grapes!). there is a hint of critique in http://jun.artcompsci.org/talks/oookayama20120116.pdf (which if I read between the lines is saying that for his kind of astrophysics, he wants accelerator-type architectures, which differ significantly from vector archs in their relation of cpu and memory. the "1+3 architectures" table seems to show a desire for dramatically lower B/F (bytes of memory BW per flop?) as well as much lower M/F. as for linpack being a bad benchmark, that's just bullshit. it's a benchmark. it's not your application. it does a good job of telling us about a form of performance that is well-understood. yes, you can make a very good guess at HPL performance if you know ncpus, peak FP rate and the interconnect performance - but conversely, a benchmark which is unpredictable is nothing to brag about! as for the criticism of K's process, well, making sausage is ugly. everything about a big project is sausage-like, and K is a fairly remarkable success given the range of issues it had to span. even ignoring the politics and finance, a sparc chip (!) that does very wide SIMD, with a memory system to support it, a cooling design to keep it going, and interconnect to scale. the only thing that pains me about the whole thing is that I don't guess all the lessons learned will be propagated or leveraged. mini-K will not be coming to a center near you. there won't be an commodity chip that gets "now with added K sauce"... _______________________________________________ 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
