Opinion: The latest Top 500 list confirms criticality of coder competence.The Processor
Forum used to be my favorite conference every year, because I was
sure that the ingenuity of processor developers was defining the
instruction set environments in which wed spend our time crafting code
in the years to come. A briefing on developments in the Alpha
or the Itanium
or the Power
processor family was a preview of an adventure in the offing—an
orientation to the language wed need to know as we made our way in a
fascinating new place.
At some point, though, it grew obvious that the most promising
destinations were all beginning to be places where they spoke the
familiar language of x86. It was like visiting a foreign country, and
discovering that the most educated residents were more interested in
practicing their English on you than they were in listening to your
attempts to speak their language. You could have a much more
stimulating conversation in the language you both knew best, and x86
plays that role for an ever larger fraction of the developers who need
to speak hardwares language at all.
Thats the message I take away from the Nov. 13 release of the
latest Top500 list of supercomputing installations, scheduled for
official presentation on Nov. 14 at the SC06 international conference
of high performance computing and networking in Tampa, Fla.
This list update marks an important shift, with IBMs Power-family
processors falling behind AMDs Opterons.
If we group Intels Pentium and Xeon with AMDs Opteron and call
them all x86 processors, we find them now representing the brains of
341 of the Top 500 high-performance computing installations—more
than two-thirds of those sites, and just over 50 percent of their
aggregate computing power as measured by floating-point operations per
second.
Power-family processors represent a little more than a third of the
Top 500s aggregate capability; Itanium CPUs less than a tenth; the
remaining 5 percent is divided among PA-RISC, SPARC, Alpha, NEC ... oh,
yeah, and Cray. Remember Cray? The name once synonymous with the most
wicked-fast computers on the planet? Now reduced to not much more than
a footnote of rounding error on the worlds list of hot machines?
As Stanford
University professor John Hennessy observed seven years ago, the
industrys asset base of coder competence turns over much more slowly
than its base of hardware. The continued expansion of the envelope of
x86 performance, largely unforeseen a decade ago, gives us all the
chance to have the interesting conversations that we need to have about
threading and clustering and manageability and fault tolerance—instead of learning to say that the
pen of my aunt is on the bureau of my uncle in a new instruction
set every five years.
Tell me what conversations youd like to have in tomorrows code at
peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.
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