On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, James Rogers wrote:
> I've been following the architecture and my general impression has
> been that it is a huge step forward in some areas, yet is completely
> useless in others such that those "others" may be rate limiting
> factors.
I like the Blue Gene architecture. I hope it will materialize in desktop
architectures, and game machines. I would really like to be able to buy an
affordable cluster with embedded memory, in a single cabinet.
> Blue Gene is somewhat asymmetric with respect to which directions it
> can solve the equation given the architecture. It will be very
Solving equations as a way of solving problems has a good record track,
but it is a subset of the entire computing.
> useful, given a problem, to do protein modeling to see what sticks
> (i.e. sifting). It would seem to be far less useful for generating a
> solution given a particular problem, mostly because the algorithm
> space looks quite a bit different in relation to something that would
> fit on top of this computer architecture.
Of course, it's still a von Neumann machine. You would have to emulate an
architecture which will closer fit your problem description.
> Sifting *is* a very useful capability, but it is still a blind
> squirrel approach to the engineering problem. The reverse problem is
A million of blind squirrels will find a nut, eventually.
> arguably much more powerful and more interesting (though much more
> difficult to make a supercomputer for), at least IMHO.
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:25 MDT