Re: Estimates for hardware requirements?

From: Jimmy Wales (jwales@bomis.com)
Date: Wed Nov 14 2001 - 17:11:18 MST


Dani Eder wrote:
> IBM has announced:
> http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20011109_bluegene.shtml

There is some really interesting stuff in this article.

It has been argued on this list in the past (and successfully, I
think), that memory bandwidth is at least as serious an issue as
MFLOPS.

---------------- quote from article ---------------
                "While today's machines are amazingly fast number
                  crunchers, many data-intensive applications are
                  slowed because of the time it takes to simply access
                  information from the memory chips. The Blue Gene/L
                  design will run these applications much faster
                  because the machine will be populated with data-chip
                  cells optimized for data access. Each chip includes
                  two processors: one for computing and one for
                  communicating, and its own on-board memory. Each of
                  the data-chip cells will work on a small part of a
                  larger problem. This increase in data access speed
                  will make a huge difference in the kinds of results
                  these machines can produce and the kinds of problems
                  they can solve."
-----------------------------------------------------

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