Current "fastest" supercomputer is ... APU powered !
By joe
- 1 minutes read - 166 wordsGo figure. Between 6 and 3 years ago, when we were pitching HPC accelerators to VCs, trying to convince them that it was inevitable that supercomputing was going this route, we (optimistically) predicted that the worlds fastest machine would be Accelerator Processing Unit (APU) based in 2012. Well, we were wrong. November 2010 is the correct answer. My expectation is that many HPC systems (probably most) will have some sort of APU technology (GPUs, vector extensions, Larabee like things, Tilera like things). Programming them efficiently is going to be hard. Very hard. Happily I know some groups working on this problem, who have IMO, exactly the right approach. I’ll be back with more writeups, including things on Lustre, Ceph, Bright Computing Manager, GlusterFS, and some bits on the state of the market. One particular article at InsideHPC needs some commentary … I disagree with a number of things in it, and I want to get into that in depth. Not a fisking, but a detailed analysis.