[Beowulf] Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers

[Geoff Jacobs]

Bruno Coutinho wrote:
<snip>
> Datamining is useful for both commercial and scientific world and is
> very data-intensive, so I think this issue will be addressed, or at least
> someone (Sun, for example) will build processors for data intensive
> applications that are more balanced, but several times more expensive.
</snip>

Here's some current hardware which is superior to the norm in terms of
I/O (so the manufacturers would claim).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasparc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

For those with really deep pockets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_SX-9

Q: Do Hitachi and Fujitsu still do vector machines?

I guess my point is that the article itself is a little fluffy. This is
just the old problem of the kernel size overflowing cache/memory
boundaries inconveniently. The answer is always more I/O and tighter
integration.

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs