Low Energy Supercomputing 159
Faith Singer at TACC writes "The term 'supercomputing' usually evokes images of large, expensive computer systems that calculate unfathomable algorithms and run on enough energy to support a small city. Now, imagine a supercomputer, but run on the electrical equivalent of three standard-size coffee-makers. This year's international supercomputing conference, SC10, will feature the Student Cluster Competition that challenges students to build, maintain, and run the most-cutting edge, commercially available high-performance computing (HPC) architectures on just 26 amps."
Sure Thing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Amps? [pedant] (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope they're smarter than the article writer (Score:4, Insightful)
"The competition challenges students to build, maintain, and run a cutting edge, commercially available HPC architecture on just 26 amps of energy."
Only problem is that the Ampere is a unit of CURRENT, not energy. It's like saying someone weighs 686 Newtons.
While I understand that if the voltage is kept the same, then the amps are proportional to the energy involved per unit time because W = V x A. However 26 amps at 120 volts for 1 second is not the same energy as 26 amps at 5 million volts for 20 years.
Re:Amps = current, not energy.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You have variable voltage outlets?
Re:Article Doesnt Say (Score:3, Insightful)
ARM would get you better performance per watt. Atoms only matter because they're x86.
Well.... (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't sound too difficult. The number one power-consumer is cooling. Distributing the same code over a larger surface area would allow you to reduce just how sophisticated and power-hungry your cooling needs to be. Any SIMD code will distribute just fine over such an architecture. If you're really clever, you'd design the cluster as a series of pentagons and hexagons, allowing you to build a geodesic. This would not only maximize the surface area but would also minimize the distance network traffic has to travel, networking being the biggest cause of latency in supercomputing. The really really clever geeks would then set up additional "regional" networks to allow for much higher performance when handling code that needed to talk much more locally, then distribute the code according to those regions. (Essentially, you then have a cluster of clusters.)
Re:I hope they're smarter than the article writer (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. Just to add some international touch to it: here in central Europe we have 240-250V outlets, which is radically different from the U.S., so putting amperage even with implied voltage is at least confusing and entirely unscientific and shows a lack of understanding about even the most basic principles of unit notations.
Re:Article Doesnt Say (Score:2, Insightful)
See, this is why some people are sticklers for grammar, spelling, and capitalization rules. Of course they're using atoms. But are they using Atoms? Your error is needlessly confusing and detracts from your point.
Re:I hope they're smarter than the article writer (Score:4, Insightful)
The only problem with your analogy is that in physics, Newtons are actually a unit for weight
You're right and I saw that after I hit the submit button. It would work better had I said mass :)
As for the power source - my home computer's power supply provides 24 volts to the motherboard. My laptop uses 19 volts. Potential at the plug socket is not necessarily the potential that is used by the machine. Especially since electronics usually convert AC to DC and use DC in their circuits. Therefore I would argue that your "assumption" is incorrect - there's no way to know what voltage they plan on using. It can't be that hard to imagine 240V or even 550V for an "industrial strength" supercomputer. Why assume 110V?
Let's put CPU's in electric heaters. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've always found electric heaters (including geysers, etc. but mostly environmental heating) a huge waste of low entropy. You can achieve the same goal by powering enough chips -- would work especially well for floor heating. Now, if you're not recycling old computers, it might cost some, but if our only constraint is energy, we can thus create a supercomputer that spends 0 energy "for itself", just by installing this system to a few buildings.
You could even communicate through the power line, thus eliminating the need for a separate network installation. "Buy our @home geyser, that pays for itself!", that sort of thing...
Re:Article Doesnt Say (Score:3, Insightful)
Moreover, all hardware must be in production and unmodified
That's an odd requirement. IMO a team that could design and build their own hardware that's more efficient than off the shelf hardware should be encouraged to do so.
Re:Times voltage times session time (Score:3, Insightful)
*Cough* Um, unless you're an embedded programmer. Then, you're expected to fix hardware guy's mistakes by making changes to the firmware.