Cellular Architecture For Supercomputers

emcc writes: "Hey there, I'm the editor for IBM's Think Research web zine and just published an article Slashdot readers may find interesting. The article goes into a bit of the philosophy and science behind Cellular Architecture -- that's the memory architecture that enables massively parallel operation in the latest deep-computing machines like Blue Gene."

help, i'm in parallel

[spacefem]

Wow, cool article...

"Cellular architecture uses ideas that have already been developed, such as putting a whole system--memory and processors--on a chip, and using many processors in parallel to carry out instructions"

This would be interesting to try in market systems, not many of us would go for it because of obvious upgradeablility, but it would speed things up a bit. If the idea's been developed, does anyone have links to where we might have seen it before? Any talk of putting it on the shelf?

"With one million processors, each performing a billion operations per second, Blue Gene will be capable of one petaflop--a thousand trillion calculations per second. Such speed will be devoted to a single set of problems--simulating how proteins fold after they are generated in cells."

Awe, is that as exciting as they can get with the application? Can't they have at least one fun-filled 900 player Quake tournament on these things before they turn to practical things like particle physics and protein folding? I'm such a dumb American, articles like this are always so dissapointing, like they kick all the mischevious geeks off the projects months before they're even concieved. Every computer in the world should in my opinion be capable of one task that will impress or amuse the general population.

*Real* cellular architecture

[sketerpot]

Network everyone's computers in to a giant beowulf cluster via cellular phones. The cellular phone company could give the people whose computers are networked free internet access in return for the use of some spare CPU cycles. They could sell those cycles. 900-player game of Quake, anyone? (or protein, I don't care.)