On 11/28/2012 11:57 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > > On 11/28/12 8:18 AM, "Alan Louis Scheinine"<[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Prentice writes: >>> An even more cynical view say that the HPC vendors lobby the government >>> to believe exascale is important so the government invests in it and >>> subsidizes their R&D. >> Whether a few big exaflops computer or many teraflop computers, >> the computational needs exceed what is now available, yet more >> computational capability runs into the problem of extreme scale >> electrical power usage. Every aspect of computers and interconnects >> needs drastic reductions in power usage, so government subsidies >> would be useful. Calling this "an even more cynical view" seems >> a little harsh. >> >> Commodity mother boards are similar or equal to supercomputer >> hardware. But I wonder what will drive further improvements in >> reducing power usage by several orders of magnitude. I've heard >> the suggestion that computers in cell phones will be the mass >> market that leads to low-power hardware suitable for supercomputers. >> But the cell phone components do not cover the same range as >> supercomputer components. > But is that really true. Sure, the processor in a cellphone is slower > than say a typical modern PC CPU.. But, given appropriate software, is it > a better $/FLOPS or W/FLOPS deal to get 100 cellphone CPUs or 1 superduper > PC CPU? >
In the case of the IBM Blue Gene, this already is true. The PowerPC processors used in the Blue Genes is based on a PowerPC processor for embedded applications, so you could argue that 'cell phone' processors are already being used for supercomputers. -- Prentice _______________________________________________ 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
