[Beowulf] IBM Sequoia

Robert G. Brown rgb at phy.duke.edu
Wed Feb 4 12:04:09 PST 2009


On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote:

> On Wednesday 04 February 2009 15:08:12 Robert G. Brown wrote:
>> Or use slow, slow, slow processors (but a lot of
>> them).
>>
>> The latter isn't a crazy idea, depending on the kind of task this
>> faster-that-fastest system is supposed to be faster on.  Some sort of
>> massively SIMD decomposable problem with minimal nonlocal IPCs where the
>> per-processor tasks are modest and nearly independent would get the
>> near-linear scaling required to use up 1.6 million cores, and it would
>> explain the 1 MB of memory per core.  Consider each node as representing
>> (say) 10,000 neurons and you've got a 16 billion neuron neural net with
>> some sort of semilocal topology. Not bad, actually.
>
> Isn't that the idea behind SGI's Molecule concept?
> http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/november/project_kelvin.html
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/20/sgi_molecule_concept/

Or

   http://www.intelligencerealm.com/aisystem/system.php

which is actually kind of intesting (if slow).

This is something that is not completely orthogonal to what might be my
next research project, so I'm actually finding the current discussion
quite interesting.

    rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu





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