lerici@super.ORG (Peter W. Brewer) (06/02/90)
In article <49600@ames.arc.nasa.gov> lamaster@athena.arc.nasa.gov (Hugh LaMaster) writes: >In article <6182@amelia.nas.nasa.gov>, eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov >(Eugene N. Miya) writes: > >|> The solution in marketing is "price-performance." > > >Price/performance is now an issue, now that smaller is cheaper, at least when >you account for it one way. It is even more nebulous, though. And, I >don't think >the average man on the street thinks of a collection of Ford Escorts as >a sportscar because they are "cost effective". > >winning in the Linpack race. That could happen Real Soon Now, but it hasn't... > Hmmmm... what happens if I take a 64K CM-2 with floating point and 4 Suns frontending it.. sun4/490s. Connect these suns with a reasonable FDDI network and populate them with lots of memory 196 MB max. The CM-2 should have large memory (4GB). I would think this would win the price performance race and even do well on the Linpacks. The Sun(s) would now be the Supercomputer.. given that the CM is really a backend array processor and the Suns have all of the user-lever software etc. I guess it is a hybrid. But not necessarily all SIMD.. even at the CM level with slice-wise processing and the sprint nodes... And what about 'The network is the system' ...??? -- Peter -- Peter Brewer |||| ||||| ||||||||| |||||| //|||||\ |||||| lerici@super.org || ||__ || || || || || THE Supercomputing || || ||^^^^^^\\ || || || Research Center ~~~ |||||||| ||||| || || ||||| \\|||||/ ||||||