HELP! * YELLOW=global GREY=local Global HTML version of Foils prepared July 6 1996

Foil 20 Comments on COTS for Hardware

From HPCC Status -- TeraFlop to Web and Petaflops -- Success and Failure Trip to China -- July 12-28,96. by Geoffrey Fox * See also color IMAGE

Currently MPP's have COTS processors and specialized networks but this could reverse
  • Pervasive ATM will indeed lead to COTS Networks BUT
  • Current microprocessors are roughly near optimal in terms of megaflops per square meter of silicon BUT
  • As (explicit) parallelism shunned by modern microprocessor, silicon is used for wasteful speculative execution with expectation that future systems will move to 8 way functional parallelism.
Thus estimate that 250,000 transistors (excluding on chip cache) is optimal for performance per square mm of silicon
  • Modern microprocessor is around ten times this size
Again simplicity is optimal but this requires parallelism
Contrary trend is that memory dominates use of silicon and so performance per square mm of silicon is often not relevant


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