Re: (OT) The desktop supercomputer has arrived!


"Alistair" <alistair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<hong...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.physorg.com/news102087207.html

A prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers has
been developed by researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James
Clark School of Engineering. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster
than current desktops, the technology is based on parallel processing on
a
single chip.

<QUOTE>
Suppose you hire one person to clean your home, and it takes five
hours, or 300 minutes, for the person to perform each task, one after
the other," Vishkin said. "That's analogous to the current serial
processing method. Now imagine that you have 100 cleaning people who
can work on your home at the same time! That's the parallel processing
method.
</QUOTE>

Hello Alistair, how are things in the UK? :-)

Where I see parallel processing helping on PCs is in two areas, running
multiple applications simultaneously and multithreaded applications (e.g.
graphics and video processing). My most common backup task involves burning
two separate DVDs. I haven't had much success burning two DVDs at once using
single core CPUs, but my dual core Athlon X2 works well. It's also useful to
burn a CD/DVD and be able to continue working without concern you will cause
a problem on the burn.

For most PC applications the primary bottleneck is disk I/O, and a
beneficial upgrade is striped (RAID0) drives. My primary PC boots to one
RAID0 2x 74GB 10,000 RPM drives, and has another RAID0 2x 320GB 7,200 RPM
drives. When I build my next PC, I plan to have one RAID0 4x 320GB or 500GB
drives, and possibly a quad core CPU. Striping can multiply the disk I/O
performance almost by the number of drives. But the drives should be
identical, or at least the same size, or you will waste storage space on the
larger drives. To boot to a RAID0 it must be implemented on the system board
or the disk controller, but Windows can do a software RAID0 on non-boot
drives. Just remember that RAID0 is about volume size and speed, not
reliability. If one RAID0 drive fails, you lose all the data, and an array
of n drives is n times more likely to suffer a drive failure than 1 drive.
Backup, backup, backup! But if you "feel the need, the need for speed", this
is a good way to go. :-)
--
Judson McClendon judmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (remove zero)
Sun Valley Systems http://sunvaley.com
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."


.

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