Supercomputer Wars: IBM vs. Sun vs. Google vs. Quantum Boxes
Also: How to ignore Nvidia
Meat Cast Last week, thousands of you did the right thing by tuning into our first Meat Cast on blade servers. You're now smarter than the average data center hack and have the blade scene down. Go ahead - lord your knowledge over friends, family and co-workers.
This week, Chris Hipp and I return with an assault on high performance computing (HPC) and supercomputers. As you'll hear in the show, we use a recent HPCwire list documenting the top ten moves in the HPC market for '07 as a starting off point for our discussion.
We cover major HPC players such as IBM, Cray and Sun Microsystems and a host of start-ups, including quantum computing house DWave Systems, big switch maker Woven Systems and now eaten by Google software maker PeakStream.
In addition, we charge through some changes in Intel's processor manufacturing technology and GPGPUs (general purpose GPUs).
Along the way, Chris and I manage to dribble out a couple of scoops as well.
You'll find all the relevant links to stories covered during the show in the Related Stories section.
I guarantee that you'll be a better looking, smarter and more affable person after listening to this show.
Semi-Coherent Computing — Episode Two
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Don't be shy about sending feedback on the shows and suggestions for future shows to hardware (at) theregister.com.
As always, special thanks go out to legend in the making Todd Phelps for letting us use his song "You Can Call Me Daddy Tonight." You'll find Phelps's web site here and his MySpace page here.®
COMMENTS
Tesla
I think people in the HPC market are underestimating the ability of GPGPU. By the looks of things Nvidia are really keen on taking a big chunk of the hPC market share.
It will be very interesting to see what the next generation of GPU's can do (after tesla 1.0)
Electricity Costs
This is an interesting discussion which ranged from the practical to the esoteric (quantum computing). Electricity use is certainly a big issue even for smaller facilities. In the UK at least, the cost of powering and cooling machines over 4 years life can now exceed the capital cost. Electricity costs nearly £1 per watt per year. In a space cooled by conventional air conditioning, about £1.50 per watt of equipment per year. Users should be costing this for all purchases.
GPUs, accelerators like those from Clearspeed, and novel architectures like Sun Coolthreads all have a contribution to make in particular problems areas.
For general purpose computing there are simple savings which can be be made. For example AMD Opteron "HE" chips run at 68 watts rather 95 watts. A second power supply a 1u server adds around 20 watts to the electrictrity consumption. On subsystems, 2.5" disks use less power than 3.5" disks, and in general, portable technology uses a lot less power than desktop or server technology.
On the desktop the most efficient "PC" is actually the Mac Mini which make use of portable technology to use only 37 watts when working hard, 22 watts when idle and 2 watts when hibernating. A typical PC will use more than double this amount of power, but obviously the thing to do is to make sure PCs go to hibernate when idle.
Focusing on total life cost, including power, rather than on capital cost could bring a major change to the market.
