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Thread: Personal supercomputer firm closes

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    HEXUS webmaster Steve's Avatar
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    Personal supercomputer firm closes

    The idea of a personal supercomputer is simple. Give power users (that's scientists, engineers and other geeks) the power of a supercomputer sat right next to them, under their desk. It's an idea that is favoured by many, including Bill Gates. However, one company putting a lot of work into the idea has now closed down.
    Last August, Orion canned 30 per cent of its staff and started hunting for more venture funding. Its closure two weeks ago would seem to indicate the funding never arrived.
    [The Register]
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    Senior Member Andrzej's Avatar
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    The problem with 'super computers' is that the technology moves so fast

    Eight and a half years ago, the US Department of Energy commissioned ASCI Red from the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative

    Costing millions of dollars, it harnessed the power of more than 9,200 Pentium II processors and - with all of this hardware onboard - because the first system to pass the 'magic' 1 TeraFLOP mark

    Today any user can have over 1 TeraFLOP of processing power simply by purchasing an pair of ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire products for around £695 + tax

    If you think that executive cars depreciate - then just consider this price drop for a second...

    ...millions of dollars to £695 is something like 8 years

    With GPGPU applications becoming widespread, surely we will see 'super computer' tasks moving to the desktop arena in much less than 8 years
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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    A Radeon's hardly a general-purpose component though, Bania.

    Orion's problem really seems to be a misunderstanding about parallel computing.

    From the outset, it sounds cool - 96 processors in a desktop-sized box? Yay! But the reality is, parallel programming is hard.

    The design of Orion's kit demanded use of the MPI-1 API, over TCP/IP, over Gigabit ethernet. Latency? Through the roof. It's hard enough to program parallel code effectively (especially with MPI), and as your code gets more and more efficient, it either begins to demand a high-end CPU (i.e. not a Transmeta) or low-latency interconnect (i.e. not TCP on GigE). There's almost no ISV code on the market that can scale to 96-way, and none that would do so faster than, say, a couple of dual opteron systems (such as the iWill Zmax-DP).

    Another issue, which might seem trivial, is lack of compilers. People in clustering pay for decent compilers (PGI, Intel, Pathscale, IBM, Absoft), because the code they generate is FAST - usually at least 20% faster than GCC. It doesn't take many dual-Xeon or dual-Opteron boxes with a decent compiler to completely blitz the Orion, both in terms of power, and in ease of programming. Grown-ups can get the real thing from http://www.penguincomputing.com/inde...273&Itemid=409 with few of Orion's drawbacks.

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    Senior Member Andrzej's Avatar
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    We had a really cool presentation on GPGPU from Mike Houston, one of the scientists at Stanford, when we did the X1800 launch event...

    ...Rys was enraptured (I beileve that is the phrase !)

    One point Mike made was that this kind of movement (CPU to GPU) is getting easier over time and that this has opened up the awesome parallel processing power of modern GPUs to a whole new audience

    You sound like an expert (in a field where it is really easy for someone like me to get in over their heads)... so I am sure your views are spot on

    The point I was highlighting (which you have confirmed with your dual Xeon/Opteron example) is that the level of power contained in a 'super computer' from a given generation, is rapidly reduced to 'desktop level' by virtue of the industry that we are in...

    ...and this 'shrinking' seems to take less and less time with each new wave of technologies

    It is an interesting exercise to try and imagine just how powerful things will be in 10 years time

    Maybe this question could form the basis of a competition
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bania
    We had a really cool presentation on GPGPU from Mike Houston, one of the scientists at Stanford, when we did the X1800 launch event...

    ...Rys was enraptured (I beileve that is the phrase !)

    One point Mike made was that this kind of movement (CPU to GPU) is getting easier over time and that this has opened up the awesome parallel processing power of modern GPUs to a whole new audience

    You sound like an expert (in a field where it is really easy for someone like me to get in over their heads)... so I am sure your views are spot on

    The point I was highlighting (which you have confirmed with your dual Xeon/Opteron example) is that the level of power contained in a 'super computer' from a given generation, is rapidly reduced to 'desktop level' by virtue of the industry that we are in...

    ...and this 'shrinking' seems to take less and less time with each new wave of technologies

    It is an interesting exercise to try and imagine just how powerful things will be in 10 years time

    Maybe this question could form the basis of a competition
    you're absolutely right, of course. sgi's bankrupcy issues are largely due to their use of the expensive itanium chip rather than a more commodity option - former allies/rivals cray have been doing fine with their opteron-based supercomputers.

    then again, the supercomputer market (like the desktop market) is becoming entirely commoditized - the hardware's no longer worth anything to the vendors (since it's all the same, and nobody's cheaper than dell), so it's all about tuning, optimization, configuration and the like.

    personally, i'd LOVE to see some of the really interesting desktop tech boost supercomputers. a ClearSpeed FPGA maths coprocessor is £5000 a card - and it's barely better than a £100 Aigea PhysX card (if only they'd reyurn my calls).

    if a radeon could run molecular biology code faster than an opteron, i'd put in an order for a few thousand - but i don't think we're there yet, certainly not from a programming/application standpoint

    in fact, these days the biggest annoyance on parallel computation is the difficulty in development - writing MPI code with FORTRAN77 isn't fun or effective. Yet, strangely, nobody's yet made an ultra-simple distributed programming API for (for example) .NET which can make use of low-latency message passing interconnects like Myrinet or Infiniband.

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    Xcelsion... In Disguise. Xaneden's Avatar
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    I read earlier on that the original IBM Deep Blue mainframe performs less terraflops (well, percentages of a terraflop) than the new X1900. Nuts, but also very cool.
    New Sig on the Way...

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    yeah, but i doubt a radeon plays much chess

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    Quote Originally Posted by directhex
    yeah, but i doubt a radeon plays much chess
    Aye, but look at the way the light reflects off the Bishop's knob...

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    Jo, are you still the OX cluster admin?

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    Senior Member Andrzej's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by directhex
    yeah, but i doubt a radeon plays much chess
    You're joking - right ?

    Have you not heard about the gangs of disenfranchised R520s combing cyberspace while supposedly in sleep mode, handing out all kinds of 64-square beatings to upstart GPUs across the plant ?
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    Cable Guy Jonny M's Avatar
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    An unrelated note for the ATi dude, I saw your Mobility Catalyst Driver on your webpage and got pretty excited about it, as my current graphics drivers are from 2004. This is because Acer are retards.

    Anyway, it says it support the Mobility Radeon 9700, which my my card, but doesn't list my OEM as a supported one. Is there a way to force the driver to install, or do ATi eventually plan to roll the driver out to all notebook makes? Or am I screwed?

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    HEXUS webmaster Steve's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Caged
    An unrelated note for the ATi dude, I saw your Mobility Catalyst Driver on your webpage and got pretty excited about it, as my current graphics drivers are from 2004. This is because Acer are retards.

    Anyway, it says it support the Mobility Radeon 9700, which my my card, but doesn't list my OEM as a supported one. Is there a way to force the driver to install, or do ATi eventually plan to roll the driver out to all notebook makes? Or am I screwed?
    I have an Acer too, woo. I just modified some ini files, but this was a while ago and I cba to do it every time a new driver comes out. I don't even know if this can be done to the latest mobility drivers.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bania
    You're joking - right ?

    Have you not heard about the gangs of disenfranchised R520s combing cyberspace while supposedly in sleep mode, handing out all kinds of 64-square beatings to upstart GPUs across the plant ?
    the same disenfranchised R520s that have zero linux support almost half a year since they were released? i can imagine they'd be bored

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