The Payoff for Petaflops
Now comes the petaflops, and with it the high processor counts that make for a radically different computing milieu. Algorithms can no longer depend on their author’s knowing what individual processors are doing; there are simply too many of them. Adaptive approaches, ones that figure out on the fly how best to organize the work, are sure to become more important, as are algorithms inspired by biology. These algorithms, however, need extensive testing on a wide range of data sets to confirm that they perform appropriately.
Designers of these new approaches need a cost-effective and highly-transparent computing resource in which to develop their codes. The SiCortex combination of low-cost processors and a rich library of monitoring software makes it the natural birthplace for this new generation of petaflops software.
