World's 'most green' supercomputer in red-hot battle between Intel, Nvidia Non-profit consortium CINECA has deployed what may be the greenest supercomputer in the world at its Bologna centre in Italy. Called Eurora, the new machine claims it can perform 3,150 megaflops per watt, compared to the 2,499.44 achieved by Green-500 king the Beacon supercomputer at the National Institute for Computational …
You are right, but this kind of error has become the "it's/its - you're/your" of HPC it seems.
Ok, so..
NVidia says that its Cuda C programming language for its own chips is now popular in its own right.
What about OpenCL, you proprietary wallowing animals?
“We [Phi] are very competitive in performance,” James Reinders told us.
Okay
“We have higher performance bandwidth."
What does that mean? Performance per second??
"We have the best power efficiency."
How is that even in the realm of the possible with x86 CPUs?
"Because it is x86-based and we book Linux on the cards, you can run whatever you want there.”
NO! Get out of there Stalker! Give me an ARM instruction set!!
The issue is operations per second per watt. How much electricity do you consume to perform a computation, is the question. ARM doesn't use much power, because it's not very powerful. They're trying to solve partial differential equations, not play Angry Birds.
Well, you would have your FLOPsing done by the vector-processing floating point units around the core CPU anyway, so I would say the CPU area itself should be one which uses least power. ARM cores sound like a good idea, no?
See for example:
"Operations per second per watt" surely that's operations per joule?
Equally flippantly has anyone here ever owned a Fiat car? My recollection is that Italian car+electricity+water=quite a lot of downtime!
Iceotope's approach to mixing liquid cooling with HPC probably makes more sense though.
"Why not use the energy to partly power the darn thing"
because low grade heat has the worst possible efficiency when used to generate electricity.
Lets say you design a weird thermal engine that can take - say - 60C heat and extract enough energy to cool it to - say - 35C.
that's about 10% thermal efficiency.
One day we could make it really really efficient and stuff so the power from the hot water could drive the whole datacentre and maybe even make it even more efficient so it could power a town too. Then we could build datacentres just to power our civilisation without any greenhouse gases.
(Sorry couldn't resist!)
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