[Beowulf] China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S.

[Alan Louis Scheinine]

With regard to the comment:
 > Do you really think you're going to program these machines
 > with something other than MPI?

Exactly, that is another facet of the same debate about the future:
the need for a shift that encompasses both programming language, execution
model and interconnect hardware.  I'm not necessarily advocating such a
shift, but rather, I'm trying to see/understand what is on the horizon.

For example, Chapel seems nice but with so few developers, it is likely
that its fate will be the same as High Performance Fortran.  What facts
should I be aware of that might indicate a different future?  More generally,
the point is to evaluate the news with regard to whether there are new
capabilities related to this possible shift.

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:55:32PM -0500, Alan Louis Scheinine wrote:
> 
>> With regard to networks, a near-future fork in the road between Beowulf
>> clusters versus supercomputers may be the intelligence concerning global
>> memory added to the network interface chip for upcoming models of supercomputers.
> 
> Yawn. First we had the attack of the killer micros. Now we have the
> attack of the commodity interconnects. Do these special interconnects
> with fancy global memory justify their cost vs. InfiniBand + HPC
> tweaks? Do you really think you're going to program these machines
> with something other than MPI?
> 
> Make your bets, wait, see if you win.
> 
> -- greg
> 
> ps. I am pleased to see that the new EXTOLL interconnect has a
> non-RDMA short message system.
> 
> pps. Blekko launches November 1. Check out the /hpc slashtag.
> 
> 
> 
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  Alan Scheinine
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