Are there some applications for which the commodity-based clusters of microprocessors are a good approach?
They provide extremely good price/performance for solving well-known problems whose computations can be evenly split among many independent processors. What could Ford do with a supercomputer 1,000 times more powerful than it has today? Predict occupant injury in accident scenarios. Improve durability analysis through full-vehicle-lifetime simulation. Explore greater variance in design parameters, helping balance competing design requirements while reducing design cycle time. Can’t Ford do those things today? The occupant injury thing is an analysis to actually compute what kind of damage is done to human organs — the brain or liver, for example. Today’s analyses with test dummies are very crude. They find at a gross level whether that kind of crash is survivable. But [occupant injury analysis] takes much more computing power than is available now. What else would you like to be able to do? Try to understand how exotic materials would work, well enough to understand if they’d work in
