DARPA Awards HPC Contracts To IBM, Cray, Not Sun 74
snedecor writes "DARPA has awarded a third round of funding for the next-generation petascale computing system. IBM and Cray roughly split the $494M, while Sun, with little track record, received none. This is in spite of Sun's radical proposal for proximity communication."
Re:more likely... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:more likely... (Score:4, Informative)
I love the Niagra design; for 90% of what I need done, it does great. It's just terrible at floating point.
Sometime down the line, past Niagra 2, one could posit a version of such a chip with enough floating point units that it's efficient in FLOPS; it's an obvious upgrade of the current chips. However, that also is not optimal for FLOPS in the HPC regime. HPC is all about hiring enough computer scientists and physicists to micro-optimize the code so that you make close to theoretical maximum efficiency in utilizing the CPU cores. Niagra is all about keeping enough contexts on the chip that you can productively use the time that normal programs spend wasted, waiting for main memory accesses and so on. HPC by definition spends the CS time and effort to avoid that already.
Re:Where was HP? (Score:2, Informative)
for round two.
Re:more likely... (Score:3, Informative)
Sun's HPC contribution is in optical chip interconnects, described (somewaht fluffily) at http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2006/2006-04-07_ Sun_on_HPCS.html [sun.com]