Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: Cray-1
-
A Call to HPC Action
The U.S. lacks a coherent strategy for developing future high-performance computing systems, ones critical for national security, economic growth, and scientific discovery.
-
The Zeros Matter: Bigger Is Different
Not that long ago, a megabyte was a lot of storage, whether primary or secondary. Not long ago supercomputers were defined by the number of megaflops they achieved. Times change. Bigger is not just bigger, bigger is different. Quantitative change begets qualitative change.
-
Two, Five, Ten …
We tend to forget the real reason the Cray-1 was so successful. It was not the innovative vector architecture and memory system, nor was it the plethora of great software. Despite our love of self-similarity, orders of magnitude really matter. It’s worth remembering this as we contemplate future exascale computing system designs and digest the…