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I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

parallella.org

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Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#31

Post by jacquesm »

onalark wrote: post #28
vidarh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that the "super computer" term in itself is quite meaningless. It's pretty much just saying "we thought this thing was fast when it came out". And while this thing doesn't really meet that label at its present scale, it is conceptually far closer to those early supercomputers than what an iPad is, both in how it's structured, the parallel nature of it (16 ARM cores; 128 Epiphany cores), the shared memory…

An iPad does resemble the supercomputers of yore, between its superscalar, vector processing (GPU), and multicore architecture. The Parallella brings distributed-memory programming in, which is a very important development. You and I strongly disagree on the meaningfulness or definition of the term supercomputer. Here's an easy definition: A supercomputer is any single, unified, computer system that is currently one…

Another grumpy old man here. I disagree with your classification. By your analogy, you'd be building a classical Ferrari capable of the speeds of that classical Ferrari, not a model. The fact that it can't measure up to today's super computers does not mean that it isn't constructed along some of the same lines and shares a lot of traits with it. Back when Beowulf clusters first came into vogue all the 'real' supercomputer people were saying 'but that isn't a real supercomputer, you're using multiple CPU's' and we all know how that discussion ended.

Give the man a break, wait a couple of years and he'll give you a 4K core cpu supercomputer for little money, that needs to be encouraged, not talked down. It's early days.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#32

Post by contingencies »

Isn't the architecture of real world supercomputers essentially dependent on their expected load?

The very notion of a 'general purpose processing supercomputer' essentially conjures one of those modern data center visions: a large array of identical consumer-grade hardware, with its high price/performance ratio: accessioned, wired, tested, commissioned, allocated workloads, managed over time and finally decomissioned by a combination of carefully developed human procedures and highly automated processes?

For instance, nobody in their right mind would install an OS on every such node by hand: it has to be PXE or similar (can you boot root-on-iSCSI direct from BIOS these days?).

I'm curious how many fellow HN'ers out there are doing this.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#33

Post by anigbrowl »

onalark wrote: post #23
vidarh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you are saying, but what is a supercomputer today is a pedestrian little home computer tomorrow. The cylinder design he's using is inspired by the early Cray models. Cray 1 had a performance of 80 MFLOPS. Cray X-MP had a performance of 800 MFLOPS. The Cray 2 (which looked substantially different) reached 1.9 GFLOPS in 1985. 1993-1996, Numerical Wind Tunnel - a 140 CPU vector computer, was at the top most o…

This is a little bit of a straw man. As Jack Dongarra will happily tell you, an iPad can outperform some of the supercomputers from the beginning of the Top500 benchmark. You don't get to be a supercomputer today by beating supercomputers from two decades ago, that's not how technology works. I'm taking umbrage at the linkbait title because I'm a grumpy old man, not because I don't think this project isn't cool (and…

How about 'I build vintage supercomputers in my spare time' then ;)
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