[Beowulf] Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers

[Chris Samuel]

----- "Eugen Leitl" <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> (Well, duh).

Hmm, they seem to be rehashing the whole SC'06
"Multicore: Breakthrough or Breakdown?" session
which looked at this through various peoples eyes.
Presentations by the various speakers (including a
certain list admin) here:

 http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~tron/SC06.html

I'm wondering though if we're starting to see a
subtle shift in direction with more and more
emphasis getting placed on accelerators (mainly
GPGPU, but including Cell, FPGA's, etc) ?

If OpenCL can deliver on its promise of a hardware
independent platform that's open source then perhaps
it could assist with the proliferation of cores,
considering that GPGPUs aren't known for a large
RAM:core ratio ?

Caveat: I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer, so be gentle.. :)

-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency