30 May
2011
30 May
'11
8:27 a.m.
On 30 May 2011 at 7:15, Shoppa, Tim wrote:
Boy, did that miss the mark. The Japanese came up with
the Fuji Eagle
(perhaps the most defining commodity-computing storage element ever)
and today teraflop-class vector processors are in every fanboy's
computer and they're called "graphics cards".
The big enemy of supercomputer engineering today is Moore's Law. By
the time design and testing is complete and product is rolling off
the line, it's obsolete. Better to spend your time building a fast
bit of silicon and hoping that it'll see a 6 month to one year
product window.
Going through the effort of designing an building a mainframe-style
supercomputer such as a Cray 3 would be folly today. Witness Steve
Chen's "box full of Pentiums" as how badly this sort of thing can go.
And it's getting steadily worse. Designing and implementing a new
CPU architecture today is becoming a matter of how fast one can cook
up a chunk of VHDL.
Eventually, I suspect we'll get to the point where a chip will be
obsolete by the time the trade rags have gotten aroud to announcing
it.
Consider that people were prosecuted for espionage for passing
"secrets" to the Soviets about the Saxpy Matrix-1 CPU in 1987. Who
even remembers Saxpy now (aside from the name of a LINPACK program
set)? Saxpy made their product announcement in 1987 and they were
pretty much out of business by the end of 1988.
I can't even keep up with CPU and microcontroller announcements
today.
--Chuck