[wplug] New IBM supercomputer aiming for petaflop

[terry mcintyre]

--- Mike Sussman <sussmanm at math.pitt.edu> wrote:
> 
> It is true that any program that runs on Linux
> should run on this
> supercomputer, BUT an ordinary program will run on
> only one "node" of
> the supercomputer.  The supercomputer is made of
> "nodes" each of which
> is a commodity part (read: an ordinary, but very
> high-end, PC), so your
> program will run no faster on the supercomputer than
> on a high-end PC.
> 
> In order to get anything like petaflop performance,
> it will take a
> complete rewrite of the program to take into account
> ways of
> communicating partial results from node to node as
> well as coordinating
> the nodes for scheduling and to avoid duplication of
> work.

There is Sluggo, which is designed to run on multiple
nodes. IBM's petaflop supercomputer will have 16000
"ordinary" processors ( AMD? or PowerPC? ) and 16000
Broadband Cell processors ... which is way 
beyond anything presently used for Go programming.

http://sluggo.dforge.cse.ucsc.edu/ -- IIRC, David G
Doshay is using a few tens of processors at present.
It might not be hard to extend Sluggo to use a few
hundred processors, but tens of thousands would be
more of a challenge.

The Broadband Cell processors are actually multiple
CPUs on a single chip - one Power core and 8 special
purpose processors per chip.



Terry McIntyre
UNIX for hire
software development / systems administration / security

310 630 7453 or 3106307453 at tmomail.com ( text )
terrymcintyre at yahoo.com

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