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Monday, March 7, 2005
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} -- Comment()
The Gathering Storms Over Speech: "Big Media should understand that when we distinguish among kinds of journalists, discriminating against some because they're not working for organizations deemed worthy (or powerful) enough, trouble will arrive soon enough for everyone."
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Misunderstanding the Cell processor, grid, and supercomputers -- Comment()
On the Cusp of Grid Computing: "The cell processor is fundamentally a grid-style super computer -- consisting of many small computers connected in a grid pattern so they can work together -- on one piece of silicon. Thus, all the major Unix variants, including Linux, will move easily into the new computing paradigm because they all support grid computing now. Microsoft's software products are, in contrast, almost wholly dependent on Intel's x86 architecture." Wrong, wrong, wrong. Fortunately it is not often that someone misunderstands technology so much as in the above quotation. The cell processor, grid, and supercomputers have little to do with each other - they are different technologies intended for different uses. The Cell processor reminds me strongly of the vector processors in the 1980's, being heavily focused on instruction-level parallelism inside the processor. Grid software is not functioning on this level - instead, grid is built of layers upon layers of software such as networking, autentication, resource brokering etc. And supercomputers can be added to grid to offer resources, but grid does not make a supercomputer except in a very limited sense. If the computers connected to a grid are (hundreds) of kilometers away from each other, the latency due to the speed of light makes it impossible to run massively parallel programs except when they are heavily decoupled (so-called "embarrasingly parallel cases"). What the writer of the above quatation was probably trying to say is that Linux is more easier to port to the Cell processor than Windows. I wonder if even this is true?
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