Revisiting Amdahl's Law 54
An anonymous reader writes "A German computer scientist is taking a fresh look at the 46-year old Amdahl's law, which took a first look at limitations in parallel computing with respect to serial computing. The fresh look considers software development models as a way to overcome parallel computing limitations. 'DEEP keeps the code parts of a simulation that can only be parallelized up to a concurrency of p = L on a Cluster Computer equipped with fast general purpose processors. The highly parallelizable parts of the simulation are run on a massively parallel Booster-system with a concurrency of p = H, H >> L. The booster is equipped with many-core Xeon Phi processors and connected by a 3D-torus network of sub-microsecond latency based on EXTOLL technology. The DEEP system software allows to dynamically distribute the tasks to the most appropriate parts of the hardware in order to achieve highest computational efficiency.' Amdahl's law has been revisited many times, most notably by John Gustafson."
Re:Buzzword-heavy (Score:4, Interesting)
The article makes sense, but I don't think the work appears to be especially innovative even if it could be very useful.
It is more than governments that buy supercomputers. They are also used in industry for things like oil and gas exploration, economic modeling, and weather forecasts. Universities and research organizations also use them for a variety of purposes. Time on an actual supercomputer tends to be highly valuable and sought after. You may disagree with the use, but that is a different question from not being used effectively.
The Secret Lives of Supercomputers, Part 1 [technewsworld.com]
"It is probably the biggest trend in supercomputers -- the movement away from ivory-tower research and government-sponsored research to commerce and business," Michael Corrado, an IBM spokesperson, told TechNewsWorld. In 1997, there were 161 supersystems deployed in business and industry, but that figure grew to 287 by June 2008, he noted. "More than half the list reside in commercial enterprises. That's a huge shift, and it's been under way for years."
Uses for supercomputers [zdnet.com]
Re:Buzzword-heavy (Score:4, Interesting)
Demand Surges for Supercomputers [wsj.com]
Do Supercomputers Still Matter? [hp.com]
Oil giant Total builds "world's largest commercial supercomputer" [information-age.com]
Re:Buzzword-heavy (Score:4, Interesting)
You might want to read / view these slides:An Introduction to Modern GPU Architecture [nvidia.com] Especially slide 42.
Modern GPUs are massively parallel in their execution. Yes they work "only" on one image, but when rendering one scene the sharers work in parallel. For example a fragment (aka per pixel) shader will be run in parallel for each pixel, limited by the number of available shader units (aka core). THIS is why you get the awesome performance: small, self contained programs running in parallel.