[Beowulf] [tt] One million ARM chips challenge Intel bumblebee

[David Mathog]

"Ellis H. Wilson III"  wrote
> For instance, if Prentice's MTBF of 1 million hours is realistic (I
> personally have no idea if it is), then that's "only" 43,800 CPUs by the
> end of year 5.  That's less than 5% of the total capacity - i.e. not a
> big deal if this system can truly tolerate and route around failures as
> our brains do.  Perhaps they could study old and/or drug abusing bees at
> that stage, hehe.

Serendipitously, 5 years is roughly the maximum life span of a queen
bee.  However, it is a pretty safe bet that if they are emulating a bee
brain, it is a worker bee brain, and a worker bee is lucky if it lives a
couple of months.  

Did it say anywhere that the emulation was real time?  Very common for
emulations to run orders of magnitude slower than real time, so
processor loss could still be an issue during runs.

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech