Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Your hog-tied supercomputer

Most of us take the computing power available from today's desktop PCs for granted.

The fact that, just a few short decades ago, the average dual-core PC with a couple of gigs of ram and a terabyte of hard-drive would have been considered almost a supercomputer doesn't really seem to excite most users.

Thanks to Moore's Law it seems that it won't be long before our computers really are potentially capable of the most amazing things -- but what?

Well it seems that the major application for these uber-FLOP, ultra-powerful, tera-MIP machines will be simulation and modeling.

That's fine for scientists and researchers, but what are the rest of us going to do with all that cyber-horsepower when we finally get it on our desktops in another decade or two?

Okay all you keen gamers and video editors, put your hands down. I know what *you* will do with all that raw computing power -- but what about the rest of us?

Most of the gigantic leaps in processing power, RAM and storage over the past 20 years has been consumed by ever-better (bulkier, resource-heavy) user-interfaces such as Windows and multi-tasking operating systems.

Open an command-line window in your favourite version of Windows and type "DIR C:"

Note how that doesn't seem to run any quicker than it did on a decent IBM PCAT clone from the early 1980s running MSDOS?

Why is that?

Instead of a wimpy 80286 processor crawling along at 16MHz you've got a blazing-fast 2+ GHz multi-core processor.

Instead of a paltry 16MB of RAM, you've got a couple of gigabytes.

Instead of a slow 20MB MFM or IDE drive you've got a state-of-the-art 250GB SATA one with several MB of hi-speed cache ram.

But that old MSDOS system really didn't seem to be that much slower did it?

Yes, it's sad but true that a heap of processor, RAM and HD is being "wasted?" by all that clever operating systemry and slick user-interface.

Now I'm not knocking that because these are the very things that have turned the microcomputer from a curiosity used only by geeks and academics, into an every-day appliance that can be easily used by everyone from pre-schoolers through to senior citizens.

But... what if you want to get supercomputer performance from a desktop PC?

Might writing your code in assembler and bypassing the fluffy, inefficient OS to talk directly to your peripherals pay huge dividends?

Is there an ultra-efficient basic OS platform available to those who want nothing more than to reduce the system overhead while maintaining fundamental single-user I/O facilities.

Forget a fancy windowing environment, user-rights/permissions and other things that really aren't at all necessary on a pure number-crunching platform. How do we turn a desktop PC into the equivalent of a rally car -- where the comfy seats, carpets, aircon, power-windows, fluffy dice and all other bits that aren't absolutely essential and constitute a performance hit have been stripped-out?

I guess we could go back to MSDOS -- but then you're hogtied by an OS that doesn't really empower the programmer to use the full power of the CPUs we use today.

Might those companies and researchers who currently spend a fortune on expensive supercomputers actually be able to obtain reasonably similar results simply by using a stripped-down PC?

Of course it could be argued that the cost of software development on such a platform might outweigh the performance advantages to be gained -- but a cross-compiler environment would solve that problem. Run your compilers and data I/O on one of those fluffy Windows/Linux machines but dump the resulting executable code onto your hotrod PC and let it fly at full speed.

Any nominations for existing OS/environments that will allow this kind of naked speed to be obtained from current PC hardware?

Yes, I know that linux without the GUI can be fairly lean -- but there's still a host of fluff in there. Even if that adds just a microsecond or two to every iteration of a complex matrix manipulation -- such an overhead can represent a huge performance hit in some cases such as CFD simulations with large datasets or long time periods.

What software platform (if any) would *you* use if you had to make a PC run as fast as it possibly could?

And, apart from ultra-realistic 3D games/VR and editing up those hi-def 3D home movies, what will you use your 2029 desktop supercomputer for?

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say on this...

PERMALINK to this column

Oh, and don't forget today's sci/tech news headlines

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font