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Story: US urged to take supercomputing beyond clusters

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Nov 18, 2004

Each X86 CPU can now do about 4GFlops. It takes about 250 PC's to do 1 TFLOP. The cost of 1 TFLOP now is $500K and takes a room full of stuff.

You can reduce the space some with motherboards using 2 or 4 CPU's but that drives up the cost.

By this time next year the Cell Processor should become available. The cell will be used for the Playstation 3 game console but should be usefull for supercomputer applications.

The Cell Chip will be built on 65 nm process and may contain up to 1 billion transistors. It looks like the cell will contain 256 simple processors each with some cache memory.

Each Cell will do 1 TFLOP. The cell is designed from the ground up to be paralleled with several high speed serial links included.

That says in about a year the cost of 1 TFLOP will be in the range of $500. That is a thousand to one cost improvement not to mention the fact that all those on chip processors are designed to cooperate with near zero latency.

How can an article like this suggest more funding for supercomputers and not even mention the cell processor which has several $billion invested by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM.

I am trying to get one of these companies to work with me to start preparing super computer applications for the cell. I think any other efforts will turn out to be wasted because no other technology will be able to compete.

It has been suggested that the cell project is a Wintel Killer and is therefore being kept hushed up.

I am not enough of a businessman to understand how the worlds biggest companies plot their strategy.

I do know that a 1000:1 step change in processing power can "change the world".

I have registered "cellsupercomputer.com" but have not done anything with it yet. Anyone interested in should contact me jet@directmotion.com

Thanks

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