When Dynamic Computer Architectures Slow Down

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Sabre
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When Dynamic Computer Architectures Slow Down

Post by Sabre »

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We all know that our new fancy, high-performance computer systems with hundreds or even thousands of processors are designed and built to provide speedier answers to very large computational problems. But who would think that advances induced by our smart phones and thin laptops conspire against the assumptions made by HPC platform developers?

Okay, here's what happened. First let's examine the HPC side of the problem. The problems these massively parallel computers work best on involve huge arrays of data and a common algorithm that is applied to each point (and usually some of its near neighbors). This processing results in another huge array that becomes the new input and the process is done again. These sorts of loops can involve trillions of data points (which may be vectors with dozens or even thousands of dimensions) and processing loop counts in the millions. This is exactly what a weather simulation problem looks like and it is the most common style of problem that these giant machines are used for.
Damn good read if you want to know about "Big Data" problems :)
Sabre (Julian)
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