[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-10-02 11:50:52 +0000, JohnF said:

> Just curious -- nowadays this particular kind of stuff would be
> done using some cuda kind of architecture. Is that right?

As with most stuff in computing, "it depends".

But yes, for some tasks, gazillions of GPUs in gazillions of servers is 
the go-to design.

For stuff like Facebook, not so much.

If you're looking to render images or brute-force passwords, definitely 
yes.  (This is why I was pointing to bcrypt and scrypt a while back, 
too.  But I digress.)

If you're doing your own rack-n-stack, you look at whether your 
algorithms can be adapted to and run in a GPU.  If it can, then you can 
load the boxes with graphics cards or with add-on accelerators such as 
the Intel Xeon Phi PCIe boards.

If you're a vendor building a server, it varies.  For the very high-end 
servers, IBM Roadrunner is built on a mix of x86-64 and PowerXCell 
chips.  Cray Jaguar is built on x86-64 chips, but Cray is now busy 
adding (retrofitting?  refitting?) GPUs to the design.

This whole area has been a moving target: ATI Streams, Microsoft 
DirectCompute, Nvidia CUDA and OpenCL provide (among other details) 
programming languages used to avoid dealing directly with the GPUs.  
For OpenVMS, not so much; the vector options (see the VAX vector 
architecture and VVIEF for some related details) and the add-on 
co-processors are long gone from the VMS market.

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