[Beowulf] Mobos for portable use

[Lukasz Salwinski]

On 01/19/2017 06:55 PM, Hamilton, Scott wrote:
> That is related to the end Moores Law.  The shrinking of the transistor stopped
>increasing CPU speed in 2005 which brought about the release of multi core CPUS
>the fastest CPU ever release was at 4.5GHz in 2004.  The newer i5 and i7 are quite
> a bit slower per core than the single core from the early 2000s by almost half.
>  Any single threaded algorithm today will suffer as core counts increase and
>frequency decreases.

I hoped cpu designers were able to squeeze some extra performance out of a single
core even when the clock stays the same but, apparently, it was too optimistic :o/

>This is creating a very strong market for technologies like  the fpga that accelerate
>single threaded logic operations.  Just look at a CPUhistory chart we are slowing
>down the core substantially making multithread arequirement for the future and yet
>we failing to train programmers with the
>skills for multithread.

same with FPGAs - it's way more exotic than writing a parallel code. add to this
a culture shock when coming from FOSS direction - constant references to
IP/intellectual property makes many (myself included) cringe; until very recently
(half a year, maybe?) the debugging module within (otherwise free) Xilinx development
toolchain had to be bought for $$$. These are exact opposite to what FOSS community
has been used to (but quite normal within hardware engineer crowd). I guess, some of
the changes are courtesy of the purchase of Altera by Intel. hopefully it will bring
these two groups closer...

lukasz

> Scott
>
>
>
> Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S7, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Lukasz Salwinski <lukasz at mbi.ucla.edu>
> Date: 1/19/17 8:43 PM (GMT-06:00)
> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Mobos for portable use
>
> On 01/19/2017 02:09 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Beowulf [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Andrew M.A. Cater
>> Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2017 12:49 PM
>> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
>> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Mobos for portable use
> [...]
>> (I just found that at least a while ago, Xilinx supported clusters for
>> some of  their design tools.. Since right now the design I'm working
>> with takes an hour to synthesize (on a single machine), I'm going to
>> look further - it has been a real rate limiter in the lab, because it
>> makes the test, new design, load, test cycle a lot longer.)
>
> it looks like current (vivado 16.4) synthesis program hasn't been
> parallelized - it's strictly single threaded and so uses just one
> core... :o/  I've recently benchmarked a few i5 & i7 workstations
> - there seem to be very little differences (maybe 10-20%) between
> CPUs released over last ~4-5 years :o/
>
> lukasz
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   Lukasz Salwinski                             PHONE:        310-825-1402
>   UCLA-DOE Institute                             FAX:        310-206-3914
>   UCLA, Los Angeles                            EMAIL: lukasz at mbi.ucla.edu
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-- 
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  Lukasz Salwinski                             PHONE:        310-825-1402
  UCLA-DOE Institute                             FAX:        310-206-3914
  UCLA, Los Angeles                            EMAIL: lukasz at mbi.ucla.edu
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