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."
UCAN (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe you could hug it with your nuclear arms.
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Second: it's nice to see supercomputing covered in Slashdot
Finally: these systems are going to be both revolutionary and evolutionary. The main thing you can predict, is that you can't predict what impact and uses they will have.
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more likely... (Score:2)
More likely, that was because Sun's radical proposal for proximity communication.
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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.
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Misspelled and Wrong FPU Information (Score:2, Insightful)
Niagara II (T2) has one floating point unit per core...so for a T2 outfit with all cores, eight FPUs.
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Maybe he meant Viagra.
I wonder if I could work Sun into this someow, something about putting it where the Sun don't shine....
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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]
Nuclear Simulation Need Complex Cores (Score:1, Interesting)
This kind of processor is not suited for the high-p
You forgot some (Score:3, Funny)
You forgot Freescale [frescale.com], Sun Microsystems [sun.com], Texas Instruments [ti.com], Hewlett Packard [hp.com], geesh, there are actually quite a few others...
Once you start searching for US chip design and manufacturing firms, you realize that there are tons of them that produce silicon that is general purpose. You only listed the thr
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Military applications? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, of the two stated applications, which do you think is more interesting to the military? I suppose one could argue defense against bioterror, but it's still kinda scary.
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This bio-attack brought to you by IBM.
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You might be surprised but the military is VERY interested in climate as well.
That said, the HPCS program - if continued until completion: whole new COngress coming up here - will produce an HPC platform that will probably end up being used by most HPC sites. Not just DOD ones.
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--Ram
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Loosing may be a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, Sun Labs was in charge of the DARPA project at Sun. They have "invested" 3 years on that. My question is "what do they have to show?".
They do not have publications on any top computer architecture conference, they do not seem to have anything that may save Sun ass. (At least from
an architecture point of view)
This is not such a strange comment, I have head it from people at IBM research itself. Some people there is not sure that winning is the best thing either.
Re:Loosing may be a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Working at Sun I've heard the higher-ups discuss these grants and awards and from what I gather, despite the award money, it is still very expensive for the company. The award money is not enough to fund a competitive entry. IBM definitely has a lot more money to put into the effort than Sun does. Not defending them though. It's a bummer for the company that they didn't get the grant, but I probably agree that losing could be a good thing. Winning would be great for bragging rights and image.
I really don't know anything.
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For IBM, I'd still say it's a win. If it weren't for some of the early work with blue gene, would there have ever been a cell processor? If their project is more related to power6/7, well those processors are used for the low end of HPC, and for high-end database servers too. Even if the DARPA system requires CPU modifications (VIVA) that don't help the general business user, any advances in memory technology,
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You may want to rethink that. The number of products developed out of DARPA initiatives which have become mainstream are astounding. For now, yes, they may be specialized devices, but the research driven by these funding sources is responsible for home technology 10 years from now. Just because you can't
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erh.... $50 million in cash from the last round of funding?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_2
Hmmm, more jobs at Cray? (Score:1)
A win for Linux (Score:1, Funny)
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This statement implies that Linux's networking stack is not "battle-hardened" or at least not AS "battle-hardened". WTF? Linux is used on routers for a reason - and it's not because of the freecell game!
Trying to imply that Linux's networking stack is anything but quite mature is just idiocy.
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This would have been a lot harder with a closed OS.
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Where was HP? (Score:1, Interesting)
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for round two.
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Orally? Or perhaps through the palestinian's belly button?
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1) That is reserved for people who say "the united states of israel."
2) How funny it is that your sig is about banning circumcision and yet you are a knee-jerker on the israel-vs-the-palestinians issue. Don't stand to close to the mohell.
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What about Fortress? (Score:3, Interesting)
Guy Steele gave an excellent talk at OOPSLA on Fortress - the slides are at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutoria
The groups's site is at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/ [sun.com]
Long term vendor (Score:2)
A beowulf cluster of Cell processors! (Score:1)