Today at HPCwire. They have a quote on the Tokyo Tech machine. (my emphasis) I remember the VC’s asking me, “but how do you know this will even matter in HPC?” during our pitch. Now I can say, “Hindsight”.

My time is a zero sum game. My day job kicked into serious overdrive in the last few weeks, and I simply haven’t had cycles to surface. Will try to force this over the weekend. Lots to write about. Like the accelerator market going into warp drive (pun intended), a really interesting BAA from the USG. And of course people who want and need things … all of these do a really good job of driving “free” time down to 0.

Given the discussions on this and other web sites by biased partisans (myself included), I thought this headline (SMB Linux use on the rise) and article was interesting. The major thesis is interesting, but the data contained within is startling. First, they note that Linux isn’t the selling point. Something we have pointed out here before, the OS is not the issue. Its the applications. It is always the applications. People claiming that the issue is the installation of the OS are missing the boat.

We use high level languages to provide an abstraction against the hardware, OS, system services we want to use. The compiler is responsible for this mapping. So when I write a simple loop for(i=1;i<N;i++) { a[i] = b[i] +c[i]; } or for you Fortran types out there do i=0,N-1 a(i)=b(i)+c(i) enddo The compiler will turn that into an assembly language loop, which loads an iteration counter (i) into a register, either load registers with a[i], b[i], and c[i], or do memory operations to load compute and then save.

Interesting. Just like we predicted several years ago. The winners in any APU contest will be the ones that can leverage economies of scale. At a few hundred dollars per unit, the Cell is likely to dominate due to the PS3 volume anticipated. The ATI, and if nVidia comes out with Quadro Plex in time, systems will also be quite relevant. Several thousand dollars per APU (ala current Virtex 4/Altera pricing) is a non-starter.

… Whether ‘tis nobler in the developers mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous application performance, Or to take arms against a sea of development troubles And by abstraction end them? – “Bill S” on whether or not to use higher level abstractions when programming for performance. Ok, “Bill” didn’t really write that, his text was paraphrased and adapted. I am also pretty sure he wasn’t writing parallel code (parallel prose maybe).

The PeakStream news, raising $17M in a B round was wonderful to hear about. I am happy for them, and wish them success. Recently I read that Linux Networx raised money as well. LNXI is also an interesting company. Maybe this is the harbinger of good things to come. I don’t know. In either case, PeakStream’s product has some limitations as an accelerator, due to the single precision focus. Linux Networx also announced its own accelerators recently, though I don’t know how much has been released publically at this point about them, or if customers have them and have reactions yet.

The folks over at Peakstream have some interesting ideas. Very similar to what we have been talking about and pitching for the past 4 years. One difference is that they have just closed a series B round, and we can’t seem to find any interest. It’s the location. Ok, on to the concept. Abstract the complexity. Make the programming simpler. Make it easy to integrate. Make it seamless. Remove restrictions. Sounds good, right?

If you are not already reading HPCWire on a regular basis, I do recommend it as one of the “must” weekly aggregation sites. They have an interesting article on the “coming” heterogeneous computing systems. Neat idea, but heterogeneous supercomputing systems are already here. Have been for a while. In massive numbers. Working on specialized HPC problems. More about this in a moment. HPC has a concept built into it. Symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP systems.

Why not ask the Council on Competitiveness. Or the businesses that have grown dependent upon simulation? Well, not all of them are doing well. Ford’s troubles are fairly well known, but this is not a supercomputing issue, it is a business conditions issue. Dreamworks and Boeing aren’t in trouble, they are doing well. As are many of the others who attended this meeting. All of them appear to indicate that they need more computing power and more software that can take advantage of this power.