The Payoff For Applications
In the early days of supercomputing there was a very direct and beneficial link of understanding between computational scientists and their hardware. The scientists knew their vector pipes and architects like Seymour Cray knew their inner loops. Each could help the other to maximize the answers per day from the machines.
One of the reasons that the efficiency of today’s scientific codes is so low (often a few per cent or less) is that this linkage of understanding has been broken. Chip designers do not understand floating point codes because that is not what they design for. Scientists have lost track of the innards of complex out-of-order nodes made up of chips from multiple vendors.
SiCortex is working to make its hardware more transparent and accessible to the scientists who rely on it. Where we can, we are eliminating the need to worry about what the hardware is doing. The Kautz graph fabric of the SC5832 and SC648, for example, has such a flat performance curve that there is rarely any reason to lay out data in any but the most natural way.
Where the behavior of the hardware does matter to the application, SiCortex is making it easy to monitor the inner workings, not just of the processors, but of the whole system. Often the true performance issues lurk in places other than the apparent ones.
In the past 10 years the transparency of software such as Linux has accelerated user involvement and interaction. Now SiCortex is expanding that transparency to hardware, making it easier to develop applications that run efficiently on the hardware, and easier to develop hardware that fits those applications.
