[Beowulf] Pony: not yours.

[Andrew Holway]

There is going to be a paradigm shift or some new kind of disruptive
technology is going to pop up before 'exascale' happens.

Quantum or some shizzle. It will do to clusters what the cluster did
to IBM and Cray.

On 16 May 2013 17:01, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:28:12AM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:
>
>> - do we need exascale anyway?  would the world be better off with a thousand
>
> Yes, EFlops is entry level for projects like
> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/neurologist-markam-human-brain/all/
> and if you want invididually accurate neural emulation
> you'll need billions of such facilities, so we're
> looking at kW rather MW here.
>
>> petascale machines?  I know the field tends to view this as a kind of
>> manifest destiny, but why?  the secondary argument usually devolves to
>> something like "well, the high end pushes the envelope so the masses can
>> benefit from trickle-down improvements."  but if this is the main
>> justification, it's a bit twisted: we need to make clusters so big that we
>> can't afford to power them in order to force ourselves to develop more
>> power-efficient systems?  if power is an important TCO component, why aren't
>> we optimizing for it already (in any sized facility)?
>
> I definitely do for my private projects, as 0.25 EUR/kWh are
> a pretty good argument.
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf