Comments on: Personal Supercomputing Survey Results

By: anon

anon — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:23:29 +0000

You seem to be assuming that by reducing the memory needed per PE inefficiencies will be introduced. That is not necessarily the case.

By: John Leidel

John Leidel — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:02:02 +0000

I believe there is a distinct difference between “running” and “running well.” Indeed, this phrase might be a bit misleading. Applications tailored to run on architectures whose per PE memory density is small, [BlueGene/L 256MB/PE] would certainly be able to “run” on a typical scalar deskside platform. There could be any number of inefficiencies moving to a [currently available] deskside platform with less than 64 PEs and 2GB/PE [depending upon the application]. Its simply a flip in platform architecture.

By: anon

anon — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:26:35 +0000

I find this comment pretty ignorant:

“Applications tailored for platforms … or an IBM BlueGene would certainly have difficulty running on a deskside.”

The only thing needed to get tailor a code to run on a BlueGene effectively are paying attention to the memory usage per task and increasing maximum concurrency the code can run at.

Neither of these things make a code difficult to run on a deskside. For example, QBOX, which ran @ 200 TF sustained on BG/L would work fine on such a machine.

By: scalability.org » Blog Archive » Personal supercomputing, as long as it’s under $10k USD

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:30:50 +0000

[...] John’s (West and Leidel) at InsideHPC.com did a nice study on personal supercomputing at the site. It is worth a [...]