(Supercomputers Still Dogged by Kryptonite
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It's off season for supercomputers. We've come to expect two waves of buzz each year, coinciding with the semiannual release of the TOP500 list of supercomputer rankings, so the next rush of press releases should begin at the end of October and run until the updated list is formally issued on November 15th. I recently took advantage of the lull in hype to catch a beer with Donald Becker, co-founder of the original Beowulf project and Dr. Dobb's Journal's programmer of the year in 1999, and get his spin-free take on what the supercomputing industry still lacks.
Now, Don's got his own slant on things, of course. As the man who helped to invent the Linux cluster and who currently serves as CTO of Scyld Software, he believes strongly that commodity off-the-shelf hardware and open software standards will continue to dominate high performance computing. (Right now 304 systems in the TOP500 list are labeled as clusters, and nine of the top ten run Linux.) But he doesn't pretend that commodity machines can compete with the raw power of custom engineered supercomputers like IBM's Blue Gene/L, which is currently the most powerful computer in the world—and it's not even finished! "I always expected [commodity clusters] would handle the bulk of the high performance computing, but not all of it," Don says. "There's a real need for these custom designed, specialized hardware machines, but there's not enough market to sustain it. So the price/performance gets even worse."
After a few leading questions, I also got him to admit a bit of cynicism regarding the mass hand-waving that occurred in the U.S. when, two years ago, Japan's Earth Simulator clocked in at number one on the list. Until that time, American systems had always held the crown, and there was much (to my mind) jingoistic hysteria issued in response. "A good deal of that fear has been generated by the people who stand to gain from having the U.S
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2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
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