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by taneq
2902 days ago
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No real questions, just that I love reading about this sort of optimization - Abrash's Black Book is a favourite that still gets pulled out every now and then. Thanks for the fun post! It always astounds me these days when someone manages to release slow software for a desktop computer despite modern systems being orders of magnitude faster than the first desktop computers while often being no more responsive. Edit: Also I'm amused by how much of a nerve this seems to have hit. I guess some people are defensive about their high performance computing approaches... :) |
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Fortunately, when articles about real HPC clusters (aka Supercomputers) make it to the front page, they need no defense, only an occasional explanation that what makes them (extra) special are the high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects. (Those interconnects make a very strong effort at Fallacies of Distributed Computing numbers 2 and 3[1] and tend to neatly take care of the remaining 6).
To be fair, though, I don't think the claim for the more common distributed systems is that they're "high performance" so much as that they're scalable (and have other benefits of being multi-node like resilience).
[1] The bandwidth may well be indistinguishable from infinite if it exceeds local (e.g. CPU-memory, CPU-CPU, CPU-GPU) bandwidths. I don't think that's yet true for something like multi-socket Intel systems, but it might be possible with enough interface cards. I didn't look at the specs on those POWER9 chips.