[Beowulf] Quasi-Non-Von-Neumann hardware in a Beowulf cluster.

[Omri Schwarz]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Joe Landman wrote:

> > http://ageia.com
> >
> >
> > While I'm bringing this up, how about things like the  MAP
> > processor?
> >
> > http://www.srccomp.com/HardwareElements.htm#MAPProcessor
>
> Or any others.
>
> Inverting the question, if you pay 4000$US per dual CPU compute node
> (+/- a bit depending upon technology, config, supplier), what price (if
> any) would you be willing to pay for an accelerator that offered you an
> order of magnitude more performance per node, on your code, and sat in
> the PCI-e/X or HTX slots?  And also as important: how hard would you be
> willing to work/how much effort committed to program these things?  This
> makes lots of assumptions, such as such a beast existing, your code
> being mapped or mappable to it, and you being interested in this.


One might presume that if a piece of kit becomes known as attractive
to our community there would be a port of BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW and so
on written for it in very short order.