Cray, Intel To Partner On Hybrid Supercomputer

An anonymous reader writes "Intel convinced Cray to collaborate on what many believe will be the next generation of supercomputers — CPUs complemented by floating-point acceleration units. NVIDIA successfully placed its Tesla cards in an upcoming Bull supercomputer, and today we learn that Cray will be using Intel's x86 Larrabee accelerators in a supercomputer that is expected to be unveiled by 2011. It's a new chapter in the Intel-NVIDIA battle and a glimpse at the future of supercomputers operating in the petaflop range. The deal has also got to be a blow to AMD, which has been Cray's main chip supplier."

AMD worried?

I'm sure the volumes of chips they sell in Crays is a drip in the ocean compard to other channels. It's not like Supercomputers are a big seller...

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After their acquisition of VIA and then later ATI, they have established themselves in a larger market than simply performance graphics chips for end users. Heck, every Nintendo product since the gamecube has used ATI hardware.

The last line of that summary

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every Nintendo product since the gamecube has used ATI hardware

I'll list them for you:

1. Gamecube*
2. Wii

*The company that made the Gamecube hardware was later bought by ATI, so ATI didn't have much to do with that.

Aquisition of VIA?

VIA Technologies is an independent company and I don't recall any significant talk of a merger with AMD. Since AMD acquired ATI they have little to gain from buying VIA anyway.

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It's more about bragging rights and PR/marketing than about volume of chips sold. I doubt AMD is terribly worried as they have much bigger concerns right now.

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AMD might be worried. Cray and similar deals are all about bragging rights, not about sales.

Like that Fujitsu supercomputer... it makes you think 'hey, maybe there is something to Fujitsu more than photocopiers...'

I don't know what influences normal custo

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>it makes you think 'hey, maybe there is something to Fujitsu more than photocopiers...'
Interesting to see how different territories have different takes on this. I've never seen or hear of Fujitsu making photocopiers. When I think of them I think of l

Re:AMD worried?

Please make sure to make a "Supercomputers is an irrelevant little niche" comment in a thread about Linux in supercomputers. Let me know how the charred remains of your karma is doing afterwards. It's all about bragging rights, in particular "the world's most powerful supercomputer" title. Most of these are trying to run some O(ugly) problem and improving the model or algorithms probably means a lot more than just adding 10x more power.

hmm.

Always makes me wonder why they need all this power, after all anybody can build a very impressive home cluster these days that would of been classed a super computer a few years ago. I guess computing requirements rise to meet available systems thus fueli

Floating-point acceleration unit, sounds familiar

Intel convinced Cray to collaborate on what many believe will be the next generation of supercomputers -- CPUs complemented by floating-point acceleration units.

Let me guess, it's going to be called the 8087 [wikipedia.org].

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Or possibly the ludicrously powerful floating point processors known as GPUs?

Perhaps now that Intel and nVidia have commercial "floating-point acceleration units" for supercomputers, AMD/ATI will come up with something too? The Hypertransport bus is alread

And the cycle continues...

A few years from now Intel will unveil their shocking new techology - they will build the floating point accelerator right into the CPU! For massive performance gains! And then a few years later they will move it out of the CPU for better performance. And so on, and so forth, etc. etc. etc.

Most likely?

it will most likely just be used for more nuclear weapons simulations [emph mine]

The majority (but not all) supercomputers on the top 500 supercomputer list [top500.org] are related not to nuclear weapons research, but meteorological/oceanographic & other scientific uses.

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Sure, but posting actual facts doesn't give the same cheap karma boost as posting something anti-war or anti-nuclear.

Then again, I'm sure people would rather see us blowing up actual bombs as tests rather than simulating them (sarcasm).

Department of Energy

DOE, which does the US nuclear weapons simulations, is probably the largest single buyer of capability-class supercomputers, but still a small fraction of the total. Even within DOE, only a large minority of systems are dedicated to Nuke simulation. Sandia

Re:Most likely?

Like W.O.P.R.

Do you think WOPR is studying the climate?

No way.

It spends it's spare cycles playing a special version of The Sims where all human life is annihilated and WOPR is the supreme ruler.

Oh, and searching for WOPETTE porn.

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Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying the weather.

Only on Slashdot.

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puts tinfoil hat on...

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Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying the weather.

The OP's point is valid, people requesting funding have better success if they can tie their research to defense, even if it's in some vague way. A

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Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying the weather.

Maybe, if we make that

Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying weather control.

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It's not always about just how much data they can process. It's more about being able to do it quickly and in parallel. Say for instance you want to simulate a black hole. You have so much raw math that needs to be handled all at the same time, there's

Re:Mega-petaflops for people

Your smug is showing, I work with one on a daily basis for the government in the missile defense arena. Hell in two months I'm going to be building one of those new IBM machines, we just signed the purchase with IBM. Yes I said that I'm going to be building one, IBM is not allowed in our building. I don't even have to rent nodes of it, we have it all to ourselves. It's not the applications or the hardware that is the problem, it's the latency. I don't care how fast your internet connection is, you cannot match the interconnect fabric of these machines. If you want to parse out little bits of data to a vast number of computers using the spare cycles of home computers is great, I'm not trying to downplay that. You just cannot run them in parallel and do real time simulations on them. That is why we have these huge monolithic computers. Let me give you two examples: Protein folding, not parallel and also not time sensitive. More of a when you finish I'll give you a new problem to chew on. Tracking millions of orbits from shit in space, very parallel requires correct timing low latency transactions between CPU nodes. Also needs results as events occur, there's no room for "When your done I'll give you a new one". Working out the problems with star travel as the original parent said is a grand idea using a distributed system, running the simulations in real time to actually have an idea of whether or not those solutions will work is where computers such as the ones I work with come in.

Re:Mega-petaflops for people

MMORPG is real time as far as the human mind is concerned. If you look at all of them they have a latency counter too, they suffer badly sometimes from that problem. Hell the new supercomputer systems are not even real time, they have problems with latency as well. That's usually what the limiting factor as far as computing nodes is, the farther you space nodes out, or the more hops that they take over the fabric all has latency. For instance, one of our old SGI machines is limited to 2048 processors (SGI claims 512) because the NUMA link interface is too spread out beyond that. Of course that's running over copper with electrical signalling, newer systems use fiber which is very fast over the line, but the bottle neck is in the connections. So yet again we run into the problem of latency being the limiting factor. They even have specialized routers in them that are designed to be transparent to the overall machine, but beyond a certain number of hops you still have latency. I wish I could post diagrams and say a little more, but I'm already treading into the "trade secrets" ground. The difference between real-time simulation and an MMORPG though is a little more sticky problem. Think of it like this, the MMORPG connects to a main server, that server has the world running on it, it keeps track of all the other players in the game. The client computer merely syncs with that server, it doesn't do anything other than present the world to the end user and take the data from the server and display it on the screen. There really isn't a strong emphasis on real-time as compared to a weather simulation. When you're running these huge simulations you have multiple independent processes and threads all going through the machine at the same time, all to achieve one single end result. I'm sorry if I'm not doing too well at making sense, I have a little trouble explaining it because I'm more of a visual person. The best I can really say is that the comparative complexity of the problems between the two is vast. Someone out there that's a little better with words feel free to step in and help me out here. Now, when we all have fiber running to every computer connected to the internet maybe then the distributed systems become more of a reality. Another problem that I see with distributed systems though is the variation in hardware. When the programs get written for the supercomputing platforms there is an expectation of sameness for the hardware. All the processors, all the memory, all the fabric links, all the buses, all the ASICS, everything is the same from one point to another. Intelligently identifying hardware differences and exploiting them for real time simulation would be a real trick if someone could pull it off. Hmmm, my firefox spell check seems to think I'm British.

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"I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but as to the MMORPG problem I had another epiphany."

Indeed. I am not sure we really need you to spend time writing any of this down.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

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The MMORPG argument is a bit like comparing a VNC session to a cluster.

In both cases you're harnessing the power of at least 2 CPU cores over the internet to accomplish a computing task.

But the capacity of the two is separated by multiple orders of magnitu