[Beowulf] [tt] One million ARM chips challenge Intel bumblebee

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 09:31:24AM -0700, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
> > On 07/07/2011 10:13 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > >
> > > http://www.techeye.net/chips/one-million-arm-chips-challenge-intel-bumblebee
> > >
> > > One million ARM chips challenge Intel bumblebee
> > >
> > 
> > Now say it like Dr. Evil: one MILLION processors.
> > 
> > 
> > How long is it going to take to wire them all up? And how fast are they
> > going to fail? If there's a MTBF of one million hours, that's still one
> > failure per hour.
> 
> 
> But this presents a very interesting design challenge.. when you get to this sort of scale, you have to assume that at any time, some of them are going to be dead or dying.  Just like google's massively parallel database engines..
> 
> It's all about ultimate scalability.  Anybody with a moderate competence (certainly anyone on this list) could devise a scheme to use 1000 perfect processors that never fail to do 1000 quanta of work in unit time.  It's substantially more challenging to devise a scheme to do 1000 quanta of work in unit time on, say, 1500 processors with a 20% failure rate.  Or even in 1.2*unit time.

They do address som of that in ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/amulet/papers/SBF_ACSD09.pdf

It's also specific to neural emulation. These should tolerate
pretty huge error rates without fouling up the qualitative
system behaviour they're trying to model.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.