[extropy-chat] Futurist priorities was ex-tropical

[Robert J. Bradbury]

Spike wrote:

> Is anyone making a grandmother board or
> some kind of power supply rack that one could plug a
> bunch of cheap motherboards into?  Perhaps 100 of them,
> and make a cheap massively parallel computer?  Seems I
> recall the computer jockeys talking about that some
> time ago.

Sure Spike -- IBM is working on it with their variations
of the Blue Gene Project.  Cray also recently won a large
contract from Sandia to build a SC ("Red Storm") which
would use more than 10,000 AMD Opteron processors putting
the SC at 40+ TeraOps.  The problem isn't so much the
task of building a rack and shoving a bunch of motherboards
into it -- its the problems of (a) power-in; (b) heat-out;
(c) minimal inter-CPU communications delays; (d) reliability.
IBM for example is slowing down the speed of the CPUs because
they can't get them close enough to each other if they run
them at maximum speeds and have to deal problems (b), (c)
and (d).  (You of all people should know this -- how long
can you run your motorcycles at 1000 RPM above red line?)

There was a recent /. item where a bunch of people were going
to bring in 1000+ PCs into the school gym and wire them together
to form a supercomputer -- the comment someone made who really
understood the problem was what about the problem of whether
or not the gym is wired to provide ~250,000W of power(!).

Robert