How clouds reshape supercomputers

Over the last 10 years, supercomputers have been wearing the x86 of Intel's machine, but in order to improve speed without consuming too much power, supercomputers are constantly drawing ideas from mobile and large fields (and silicon crystals-in the form of ARM chips or DSP).

In fact, before this century, many supercomputers were a completely different beast, supporting only specialized chips and software. But by the turn of the century the industry began to switch to commercial chips. Now, to meet the need to run billions of dollars with lower energy consumption, chipmakers are beginning to absorb inspiration from cloud computing and mobile.

Arm fitting Supercomputing

With the 2011 Supercomputing Conference opened in the Seattle, Nvidia, Germany, arm and so on have released new chips, these chips are supported by our scientific research, climate prediction, and from oil production to automotive design industries for high-end simulation relies on the machine.

Nvidia is a new man in the supercomputing market, but it has made great strides since 2008 as a way to speed up its energy consumption, when the company unveiled its own graphics processor (GPU) for the first time. It is said to be using its own high-end GPU and new gpu+arm chips to make a new supercomputer in Spain. This will be the first Test water supercomputer based on ARM processors. So far, arm has been the choice of a mobile phone and a Tablet PC kernel.

Advances in Super Computer accelerator chips

Nvidia's GPU is doing a fantastic job, with 39 of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers using a GPU as an accelerator, of which 35 use Nvidia's chips. The graphics processor is used for supercomputers because they can handle large-scale parallel tasks, which are required for high-end computing and have less energy than average Intel and AMD CPUs.

It may have been inspired by Nvidia's intrusion into supercomputers on the GPU, and Germany has also launched its own digital signal processor for high-performance computing. DSP chips are really good at math, and they are also used on communication chips and routers. Germany has been considering entering the supercomputer field, but this is the first time it officially entered the market.

New chips for cloud computing

The energy-efficiency problems afflicting supercomputers are also troubling those web-webscale applications, from Facebook to Amazon Web Services. Operators of cloud and network scale computing data centers do not look for specialized engines like the network's Unlimited bandwidth technology (Infiniband), often they adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy, running one or more applications on their own hardware, similar to supercomputers, and allowing all loads to be optimized for speed.

This is the opportunity for chips and hardware vendors, Tilera, Calxeda and applied micro are redesigning chips to power the cloud. Meanwhile, companies like Adapteva, which make large multicore chips for mobile phones and high-performance computing, see Opportunities to access supercomputers and mobile phones, both of which require more powerful computing power while reducing energy consumption. With arm on the ship in Nvidia's Dongfeng, it is clear that supercomputing is going to be super without the influence of a PC. (36 Krypton)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)