Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!lll-winken!vette!brooks
From: brooks@vette.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ATTACK OF KILLER MICROS
Message-ID: <35896@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 15 Oct 89 18:20:48 GMT
References: <35825@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1081@m3.mfci.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 33

In article <1081@m3.mfci.UUCP> colwell@mfci.UUCP (Robert Colwell) writes:
>So while it's ok to chortle at how the micros have caught up on the scalar
>stuff, I think it would be an unwarranted extrapolation to imply that the
>supers have been superseded unless you also specify the workload.
Microprocessor development is not ignoring vectorizable workloads.  The
latest have fully pipeline floating point and are capable of pipelining
several memory accesses.  As I noted, interleaving directly on the memory
chip is trivial and memory chip makers will do it soon.  Micros now dominate
the performance game for scalar code and are moving on to vectorizable code.
After all, these little critters mutate and become more voracious every
6 months and vectorizable code is the only thing left for them to conquer.
No NEW technology needs to be developed, all the micro-chip and memory-chip
makers need to do is to decide to take over the supercomputer market.

              They will do this with their commodity parts.


Supercomputers of the future will be scalable multiprocessors made of many
hundreds to thousands of commodity microprocessors.  They will be commodity
parts because these parts will be the fastest around and they will be cheap.
These scalable machines will have hundreds of commodity disk drives ganged up
for parallel access.  Commodity parts will again be used because of the
cost advantage leveraged into a scalable system using commodity parts.
The only custom logic will be the interconnect which glues the system together,
and error correcting logic which glues many disk drives together into a
reliable high performance system.  The CM data vault is a very good model here.


          NOTHING WILL WITHSTAND THE ATTACK OF THE KILLER MICROS!



brooks@maddog.llnl.gov, brooks@maddog.uucp