[Beowulf] Vector coprocessors

[Michael Creel]

Daniel Pfenniger wrote:
> The shipment of this accelerator card has been delayed many times. Last 
> time
> I asked was October 2005.   Apparently the first shipment has been made 
> this
> month for a Japanese supercomputer with 10^4 Opterons.   The cost is not
> indicated, but something like above $8000.- per card would put it outside
> commodity hardware.  I wouldn't be astonished that more performance can
> be obtained in most applications with commodity clustering.
> 
> If Clearspeed would consider mass production with a cost like $100.-$500.-
> per card the market would be huge, because the card would be competing with
> multi-core processors like the IBM-Sony Cell.
> 
> The possibly most interesting niche for the Clearspeed cards appears to me
> accelerating proprietary applications like Matlab, Mathematica and 
> particularly
> Excel that run on a single PC and that can hardly be reprogrammed by their
> users to run on a distributed cluster.
> 
> Dan

There is a MPITB for Matlab http://atc.ugr.es/javier-bin/mpitb_eng and a 
MPITB for Octave http://atc.ugr.es/javier-bin/mpitb that let's them use 
MPI calls to run on a distributed cluster. The Octave package works very 
well in my experience.
Michael