[BBLISA] physicalization

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: Ian Stokes-Rees [mailto:ijstokes at hkl.hms.harvard.edu]

> 

> Keep us updated on what you discover on this front.  People have been

> trying this kind of thing in different forms for quite awhile.

 

Well, my findings so far are:  The purchase cost per core is approx the
same, to buy the zillions of atoms versus buying a smaller number of xeon
etc of equal total compute power, but the density and power consumption of
the atoms is significantly lower (an order of magnitude) thus yielding a
lower total cost of ownership.  Figures range from 25% to 50% lower TCO.

 

 

> >From a different perspective, (and also *very* dependent on your

> having a good grasp of the workload characteristics), if this is a high

> value and long term workload you *may* be able to benefit from GPUs,

> which effectively are hundreds of slower compute cores accessible from

> the same system image, but will require a small computational kernel

> which you can port to a GPU environment.

 

One of our guys is currently exploring the possibility of porting the
present jobs to GPU.  It may work out, but it's fundamentally more difficult
to program for a GPU, so it's less versatile for adaptation to changes of
your algorithm, or new requirements.  Thanks for the suggestion...

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.bblisa.org/pipermail/bblisa/attachments/20100628/9c5ba5c7/attachment.html