[onalark]

This is a misleading title. Brian builds Supercomputer Models, not Supercomputers. It would be like if I had a model of a Ferrari I put together at home and wrote an article about how I built sports cars in my spare time.

Yes, these are awesome, full-featured models, but the differences between this and a supercomputer, which costs tens of millions of dollars, requires high-density power and cooling, features multi-dimensional, low-diameter networks, and contains hundreds of thousands to millions of compute cores is... quite vast.

[vidarh]

I get what you are saying, but what is a supercomputer today is a pedestrian little home computer tomorrow.

The cylinder design he's using is inspired by the early Cray models. Cray 1 had a performance of 80 MFLOPS. Cray X-MP had a performance of 800 MFLOPS. The Cray 2 (which looked substantially different) reached 1.9 GFLOPS in 1985.

1993-1996, Numerical Wind Tunnel - a 140 CPU vector computer, was at the top most of the time. It reached it's all time peak at around 235.8 GFLOP/s

Even ASCII Red, which held the top spot until the end of the 20th century, only reached 1.3 TFLOPS.

So unlike if you built a model of a Ferrari at home, this thing actually substantially outperforms the fastest supercomputers up until the mid 90's.

[onalark]

This is a little bit of a straw man. As Jack Dongarra will happily tell you, an iPad can outperform some of the supercomputers from the beginning of the Top500 benchmark. You don't get to be a supercomputer today by beating supercomputers from two decades ago, that's not how technology works. I'm taking umbrage at the linkbait title because I'm a grumpy old man, not because I don't think this project isn't cool (and admirable!)

[vidarh]

My point is that the "super computer" term in itself is quite meaningless. It's pretty much just saying "we thought this thing was fast when it came out".

And while this thing doesn't really meet that label at its present scale, it is conceptually far closer to those early supercomputers than what an iPad is, both in how it's structured, the parallel nature of it (16 ARM cores; 128 Epiphany cores), the shared memory (within each Parallella) etc..

So yes, you're being grumpy about a title where it takes about 10 seconds to figure out that this isn't actually about someone building stuff aiming for the Top500.

[onalark]

An iPad does resemble the supercomputers of yore, between its superscalar, vector processing (GPU), and multicore architecture.

The Parallella brings distributed-memory programming in, which is a very important development.

You and I strongly disagree on the meaningfulness or definition of the term supercomputer. Here's an easy definition: A supercomputer is any single, unified, computer system that is currently one of the fastest 500 in the world.

[jacquesm]

Another grumpy old man here. I disagree with your classification. By your analogy, you'd be building a classical Ferrari capable of the speeds of that classical Ferrari, not a model. The fact that it can't measure up to today's super computers does not mean that it isn't constructed along some of the same lines and shares a lot of traits with it. Back when Beowulf clusters first came into vogue all the 'real' supercomputer people were saying 'but that isn't a real supercomputer, you're using multiple CPU's' and we all know how that discussion ended.

Give the man a break, wait a couple of years and he'll give you a 4K core cpu supercomputer for little money, that needs to be encouraged, not talked down. It's early days.

[mscman]

I actually disagree with your definition of supercomputer, and liken it to any compute system or cluster with more power than an average enterprise server or workstation. After all, they really exist to solve problems which can't be solved by traditional computing.

I think the metric of it being one of the fastest 500 in the world is a little disingenuous to all of the other supercomputers out there.

[anigbrowl]

How about 'I build vintage supercomputers in my spare time' then ;)

[poulson]

Or, "Brian builds distributed-memory computers". Despite the misleading title, I think such a project would be a great tool for a parallel computing class. Such a machine would be roughly the same cost as a textbook and would be much more rewarding than running MPI on a multicore laptop/desktop.

[onalark]

Agreed. It's a really cool project, and maybe you should build one for your next parallel computing class :)