From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Mon Jul 02 2001 - 16:04:59 MDT
Dani Eder wrote:
>
> --- Brian Atkins <brian@posthuman.com> wrote:
>
> > P.S. there is an article on Blue Gene in the July
> > Wired.. they talk about
> > the spinoffs which will likely be multi-teraop
> > supercomputers that will
> > take up only perhaps a single rack of floorspace,
> > require less than 1/20th
> > the electrical power of existing supercomputers, and
> > cost less than one
> > million bucks... perhaps closer to $100k. Oh yeah
> > this is all scheduled
> > to be around 2004.
>
> This year's state of the art would be a rack full of
> Dual Athlon systems. By this fall they will be
> available in a 1U form factor at 1.4Ghz. Each
> CPU produces 2 Gflops. A dual-CPU system is then
> 4 Gflops, and you can pack about 32 1U systems in
> a rack, for 128 Gflops in a 1 rack space. Initially
> these systems will go for around $3K each, so you
> can figure about $100K for a rack full.
>
> If you are going for maximum processing capacity
> per dollar rather than per cubic meter, you can
> already build a cluster out of desktop PC parts
> for around $500-1000 per node, giving you $250-500/
> Gflop, or $250K-500K/Teraflop. The major variable
> is how much RAM and hard disk per node you buy.
>
So if we guess that we get two doublings in performance in these
commodity chips, then we get into the range of 4tflops for $250k-
500k by 2004 at the earliest. Not taking into account that a beowulf
may not be able to achieve the same real world performance of a
blue gene design due to slower inter-node links. What's interesting
to me is that this means the beowulf price advantage may disappear
after 2004... it looks like by then you can buy a blue gene spinoff
for the same price, which may have better performance, and may be
more easily supportable due to its self-healing nature, and also will
likely take up less space and power. Will supercomputers continue to
outstrip the advances in "consumer level" systems?
-- Brian Atkins Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.intelligence.org/
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