Jim Lux wrote:
At 12:04 AM 3/16/2006, Daniel Pfenniger wrote:
The shipment of this accelerator card has been delayed many times.
Last time
I asked was October 2005. Apparently the first shipment has been
made this
month for a Japanese supercomputer with 10^4 Opterons. The cost is not
indicated, but something like above $8000.- per card would put it outside
commodity hardware. I wouldn't be astonished that more performance can
be obtained in most applications with commodity clustering.
There are probably applications where a dedicated card can blow the
doors off a collection of PCs. At some point, the interprocessor
communication latency inherent in any sort of cabling between processors
would start to dominate.
If Clearspeed would consider mass production with a cost like
$100.-$500.-
per card the market would be huge, because the card would be competing
with
multi-core processors like the IBM-Sony Cell.
You need "really big" volumes to get there. Retail pricing of $200
implies a bill of materials cost down in the sub $20 range. Considering
that a run of the mill ASIC spin costs >$1M (for a small number of parts
produced), your volume has to be several hundred thousand (or a million)
before you even cover the cost of your development.
The video card folks can do this because
a) each successive generation of cards is derived from the past, so the
NRE is lower.. most of the card (and IC) is the same
b) they have truly gargantuan volumes
c) they have sales from existing products to provide cash to support the
development of version N+1.
{I leave aside the possibility of magic elves, although with some
consumer products, I have no idea how they can design, produce, and sell
it at the price they do. Making use of relative currency values can
also help, but that's in the non-technological magic elf category, as
far as I'm concerned.}
The possibly most interesting niche for the Clearspeed cards appears
to me
accelerating proprietary applications like Matlab, Mathematica and
particularly
Excel that run on a single PC and that can hardly be reprogrammed by
their
users to run on a distributed cluster.
I would say that there is more potential for a clever soul to reprogram
the guts of Matlab, etc., to transparently share the work across
multiple machines. I think that's in the back of the mind of MS, as
they move toward a services environment and .NET
You mean like ISC's Star-P which provides parallel extensions for
Matlab? http://www.interactivesupercomputing.com/
I have not used their product, so I can't confirm it works. I saw
a demo and it appeared that converting Matlab syntax to Star-P is
straightforward. It falls into the 'mostly' transparent category.
Craig
Jim
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