Depending on whom you talk to, supercomputing is either enjoying a renaissance or a slow death. Some industry observers believe the supercomputing market no longer exists, citing as their example that desktop machines have more power than old Crays.
Poppycock, said Sun Microsystems on Tuesday in introducing a new line of supercomputers - and a worldwide effort to spur development of tools and applications to run on them.
Sun's new Ultra HPC series is based on the company's existing UltraSPARC II processors, scalable to a maximum of 64 chips. This top-of-the-line configuration can generate 32 gigaflops of peak performance, the company said. In addition, up to 16 of these 64-processor HPC machines can be "clustered" together to generate a half teraflop - a trillion operations per second - of peak performance.
Sun used Tuesday's announcement to engage in a game of supercomputing one-upmanship with Silicon Graphics. Sun maintains that its hardware architecture, symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), is more easily scaled and is less of a burden on developers than SGI's Cray Research-designed cache coherent non-uniform memory access (CCNUMA).
The main differences between the two architectures is in how they scale - or perform when more processors are added to the system - and in how they allocate memory. For example, an application written for a smaller configuration of Sun's Ultra HPC automatically runs on the 64-processor model, but an application written for one CCNUMA configuration may need to be rewritten to handle memory differently on another configuration, said Van Meyer, Sun's market development manager.
At the same time, there are limits to the number of processors in an SMP system. Sun systems are limited to 64 processors. By contrast, a single Cray T3E-900 holds more than 128 processors.
But bravado aside, supercomputing appears to be reaching a nadir. Once the province of US Defense Department applications, supercomputers are falling to souped-up personal computers in complex modeling, such as vehicle "crumple zone" analysis. Only last December, Intel used 9,000 Pentium Pro processors to perform at the teraflops level. That system is soon to be delivered to Sandia National Laboratory as part of the US Department of Energy's efforts to conduct nuclear testing with bits, not atoms.
With that teraflops splash, Intel will exit the supercomputing market. "Supercomputing isn't what it used to be," said Dick Ammerman, teraflops program manager for Intel.
Jumping into the breach may be a whole line of even more highly specialized machines, based on quantum physics or even strands of DNA.
