[Beowulf] Moores Law is dying

[Peter St. John]

Yes, supersonic travel over land is restricted in the U.S.; so for example
the SST was good for NY to London but not NY to LA.

We're no where near the limits to information per cubic centimter; but I
don't know how to define information **processing** per cubic centimeter.
Maybe if we define causally-correlated flops (so, the seqential, dependent
FLOPS of a single core, single thread machine is 100%, the FLOPS distributed
across the globe are 0%, and the distributed cores of a Beowulf working on a
single problem, but with some wasted effort because not every core can take
into account every up-to-the-nanosecond current state of every other core)
is X% for 0 < X < 100. Then, we could define causally-correlated FLOPS per
cubic Centimter as a unit of information processing density..?  And to find
the limit you'd have to account for the cc's where the heat goes.

But I'm no physicist.

Peter

On 4/9/09, Prentice Bisbal <prentice at ias.edu> wrote:
>
> richard.walsh at comcast.net wrote:
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Ken Schuster" <ken at kschuster.org>
> > To: beowulf at beowulf.org
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 8, 2009 2:29:17 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> > Subject: [Beowulf] Moores Law is dying
> >
> >>An IBM researcher says Moore's Law is running out of gas. IBM Fellow
> > Carl Anderson, who
> >>oversees physical design and tools in its server division, predicted
> > the end of continued exponential
> >>scaling down of the size and cost of semiconductors:
> >
> >>"There was exponential growth in the railroad industry in the 1800s;
> > there was exponential
> >>growth in the automobile industry in the 1930s and 1940s; and there was
> > exponential growth
> >>in the performance of aircraft until [test pilots reached] the speed of
> > sound. But eventually
> >>exponential growth always comes to an end," said Anderson.
> >
> > Mmm ... he may be right, but I do not like his historical references
> > which seem
> > to conflate engineering and economics.  Better to refer to the
> > improvement in
> > magnets or something similar.  But, I like the speed of sound reference
> > because
> > it suggests that there is a Moore's Law barrier to be broken.  There is
> > a lot of
> > talk about "walls" these days ... the memory wall, the power wall, ...
> > but we with
> > respect compute power we have a ways to go before we reach the
> > Bremermann Limit.
> >
>
>
> This is clearly off-topic, so please feel free to ignore:
>
> I disagree with the sonic barrier wall analaogy. Is it that clearly
> technical barrier the slowed down jet research, or did the nuisance of
> sonic booms to people on the ground just make supersonic R&D less
> convenient? I've heard that supersonic travel over land is restricted in
> the US.
>
>
> --
>
> Prentice
>
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