3 Apr
2013
3 Apr
'13
noon
On 04/03/2013 06:41 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
That's why I was so incredulous and taken aback by
your OFF THE WALL
statements! (YOU were the one who made those statatements - full post
below) I even speculated that my whole perception of such machines was
wrong and that things had gone through extraordinary changes that I
was unaware of!
I apparently made the false assumption that we both shared the view on
what the Road Runner really is, a collection of CPU's each in its own
motherboard each in its own case. So I carelessly thought that when I
referred to the possibility of replacing the CPU it would be clear that
each CPU would be replaced from it's socket.
I seems that you view Roadrunner as _one_ computer and then it certainly
becomes ridiculous to talk about _the_ CPU in _a_ socket and I
understand why you think I was off the wall.
I'm sorry for the confusion and I hope you are not just being sarcastic
with me, that translates badly in text.
Going back to topic. It certainly is possible to design a super computer
that is modular. The SGI Origin2k is a wonderful example of that, though
it only scales to a certain limit (128 CPUs I think). Heck, even the
Roadrunner is quite modular, you could probably cut it up into a hundred
different pieces and each piece would be quite a competent cluster of
computer for a researcher willing to pay the power bill.
Kind Regards,
Pontus.