Need Help on Building A Concepts From The Past.

I applaud any efforts to devise ways to expand and improve computing capabilities, so keep the ideas coming.

Designing and building new chips and chip packaging methods can be quite costly and of course if you want to recover the engineering costs, you need to be able to build and sell many systems.

One less expensive way to experiment with expanded computing horsepower is to simply use more existing systems. For example instead of immediately designing a motherboard with 12 CPUs and a bunch of extra RAM slots on it, you could start by simply networking 12 existing computers. By the way, you can already buy computers that have 16 cores and 512 Gb RAM, so networking a few of these would provide serious computing capability. Check out the HP Z820.

It is certainly possible to kluge a bunch of older parts together to make a "super computer" and I would like to see the result but be prepared to spend a few man-years on hardware and software design to get it working well. Don't let this discourage you, the more effort you expend on it the more worthwhile you will find it.

Doug

Douglas Wong wrote:

 

One less expensive way to experiment with expanded computing horsepower is to simply use more existing systems. For example instead of immediately designing a motherboard with 12 CPUs and a bunch of extra RAM slots on it, you could start by simply networking 12 existing computers.

That's very good advice.  With gigabit Ethernet and USB3.0 becoming ever cheaper and marching towards ubiquity, the communication barriers to distributed architecture are rapidly vanishing, and these possibilities are easily within reach today even on a domestic budget.

But there is an even greater reason for heading in that direction, and that is that in the Big Picture, monolithic systems have no future, absolutely none at all.  Although gains in central processing power (ie. single devices) will not cease to appear, it's well recognized that the process has slowed down dramatically from its heyday of doubling performance every year or so, which is why (theoretically at least) we're in the "age of multicore" and need to exploit the power of separate units all computing in parallel if we are to achieve significant gains in performance.

Although today's "multicore" solutions mostly continue their previous obsession with monolithic architecture by placing all the cores in one package, it doesn't have to be that way, and indeed it cannot continue that way for one very strong technical reason.  Information processing consumes a lot of power, and that is not just because of lossy logic devices but because it is inherent in today's non-reversible model of computation on information-theoretic grounds.  As a result, short of fundamental changes in the theoretical basis of our computing, there are strong limits to how much processing you can place within a single package without rapidly exceeding the heat dissipation abilities of that package.  No matter how clever we become at reducing losses and improving thermal flow, in the end this puts both practical and theoretical limits on monolithic systems.

So, we might as well embrace the inevitable and "go distributed".

That aside, challenges are good anyway.  You don't have to be a researcher to enjoy doing something new.

I notice that my posts in this thread and some of the OPs later posts have been removed ?

Is there some reason for this - it looks like random censorship of perfectly resonable responses is back.

MK

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

I notice that my posts in this thread and some of the OPs later posts have been removed ?

 

Is there some reason for this - it looks like random censorship of perfectly resonable responses is back.

We've seen the "Report Abuse" button be abused on many occasions in the past.  It's essentially broken.

"Report Abuse" should do exactly what it says --- just bring a post to the attention of moderators by reporting it, and only reporting it, nothing else, not removing it.  Experience here has shown that people report posts just because they disagree with them even though those posts are entirely compliant with site guidelines.  Automatic removal effectively implements a policy of "guilty until proven innocent".  This is just plain wrong.

It should require a far higher level of consensus before removal occurs.  I suggest a very simple change:  the first click on "Report Abuse" should just report the possibility of abuse to moderators, but more people need to report the same post before it is actually removed.  The number of "more people" is a matter for careful consideration, but the very smallest number of "more" should be "1 more", otherwise abuse of the facility is just trivial, as now.  There are enough eyeballs in the forum for "2 more" to be required though, which would be much safer level of community consensus.

I'll settle for "1 more", certainly better than what we have now.  As it stands, it's simply unfair and broken.

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

I notice that my posts in this thread and some of the OPs later posts have been removed ?

 

Is there some reason for this - it looks like random censorship of perfectly resonable responses is back.

We've seen the "Report Abuse" button be abused on many occasions in the past.  It's essentially broken.

"Report Abuse" should do exactly what it says --- just bring a post to the attention of moderators by reporting it, and only reporting it, nothing else, not removing it.  Experience here has shown that people report posts just because they disagree with them even though those posts are entirely compliant with site guidelines.  Automatic removal effectively implements a policy of "guilty until proven innocent".  This is just plain wrong.

It should require a far higher level of consensus before removal occurs.  I suggest a very simple change:  the first click on "Report Abuse" should just report the possibility of abuse to moderators, but more people need to report the same post before it is actually removed.  The number of "more people" is a matter for careful consideration, but the very smallest number of "more" should be "1 more", otherwise abuse of the facility is just trivial, as now.  There are enough eyeballs in the forum for "2 more" to be required though, which would be much safer level of community consensus.

I'll settle for "1 more", certainly better than what we have now.  As it stands, it's simply unfair and broken.

edited by myself. it was not an error. due to one of the chips. still being used by the armed forces, today. reasons edited.

no longer adding to conversation right now. untill i build the board and make a few more of them. but its going to be a long time untill i am able to hand out the chips i posted above and the deleted ones. so i am ending the conversation.