[Beowulf] Mobos for portable use

[Joe Landman]

On 01/20/2017 02:38 PM, Douglas Eadline 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.  This is creating
>> a very strong market for technologies like the fpga that accelerate single
>> threaded logic operations.  Just look at a CPU history chart we are
>> slowing down the core substantially making multithread a requirement for
>> the future and yet we failing to train programmers with the skills for
>> multithread.
>
> Learn/teach Julia

+1 for this.  Julia is an excellent language.

(shameless off-topic plug) https://github.com/joelandman/nyltiq-base is 
an initial step at building modern analytical toolchain for people to 
use great tools like Julia/IJulia (and many others).

As for FPGA ... sorta like the joke about Gallium Arsenide being the 
material of the future, and always will be (think about it) ... I've had 
the same sense of FPGAs.  Mostly because of a lack of real standards for 
them, costly, non-portable, non-open development tools, etc.  These 
problems may eventually be solved.  But this is what I said 14 years ago 
when we started building accelerators.

Joe's first rule of market dominance:  target ubiquity.  GPUs have done 
a tremendous job there. FPGA, not so much.

But the on-topic complaint is that programmers are not being trained on 
multithreading.  Doug's point was that tools like julia enable you to 
avoid worrying about that in many cases, as it does the right thing.

OpenMP and other tools enable you to build multi-threaded/parallel code 
fairly easily if you prefer to stay with C/C++, Fortran, others.

This said, its hard enough now for developers without much experience to 
properly reason about their code and understand how to 
multi-thread/parallelize.  I've seen people gleefully write on HN and 
other places how they chase lock-free data structure development, though 
this is rarely what they really need.

Always start with an understanding of where your code spends time, why 
it spends time there, and then see if you can move upwards from there to 
leverage multi-threading/parallelization.

Julia makes this quite easy BTW.  Its built into the (macro) language.

>
>
> --
> Doug
>
>>
>> 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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Joe Landman
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