Daniel Pfenniger wrote:
You need "really big" volumes to get there.
Yes, but it does not seem to me unreasonable to put such a card in
millions of PC's if the average applications run a bit faster and the
cost increase stays below the PC cost. After all
the 8087 math coprocessor of the i386 era did just that.
I agree that it makes sense to put such a card into millions of PCs.
Not at $8000/card. The issue is that the C600 costs quite a bit itself
as it is not being produced in volumes that can drive enough economies
of scale (yet). So the basic part will be a few k$. The card cost will
be (relatively speaking) low.
I think (WAG here) that Clearspeed wants people to design a socket onto
motherboards for them. Lowers the costs all around.
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
Lots of people have thought about that for a long time, including
Cleve Moeller. The potential clever soul should be well above
average, and considering MS products, well above MS average programmer.
An intriguing way to parallelize C with threads on multicore processors is
provided by Cilk (http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk/). Cilk consists of
a couple of simple extensions to the C language.
If anyone has experience with Cilk it would be nice to share.
The only problem with extensions to any language is that you get a
hideously low adoption rate. You could use UPC. Or Cilk, or ...
(insert your favorite extension here). Only a small (miniscule)
fraction of people will use it, regardless of its technical merits.
Dan
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected]
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 734 786 8452
cell : +1 734 612 4615
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected]
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
