I've been looking at the processor requirements for a fairly large research signal processing job (say 0.5 TeraFLOP usable so probably 3 TFLOP 'theoretical') and wondered if anyone could point me to appropriate news groups or web resources.
I'm considering the likes of Mercury and Sky (Altivecs) and I'm also keen on understanding what the PC Blade market has to offer since this appears to offer advantages in certain areas. (Power/CPU density isn't such a driving force as it might be in a production environment).
There seem to be the lower power options and high end products (e.g. Opteron, Itanium2, Power4)
Chief areas of concern:
Supporting high data rates (100+ MB/s per channel) e.g. Infiniband, RapidIO, serial FPDP, Myrinet etc.
Understanding OS (or just a kernel) choice. - Don't particularly need multi-threading (can cause some real miserable cache flushes )
Evaluating (particularly in the PC market) well respected vector processing libraries, optimising compilers etc. - Also discussions on PVM, MPI, Signa processing libs etc. Holy grail is a system that runs on a single workstation/PC or a parallel 'farm'.
High speed comms - I know many of the options available, but want to hear user experiences e.g. the university supercomputer projects etc.
I really want to avoid reinventing many wheels or dying a death at the bleeding edge.
I know this isn't the place typically for these discussions though it does get touched upon sometimes so pointers would be appreciated. (This group has helped with high availability discussions, I2C etc.)
Followed the FAQs, comp.dsp and several other useful starting points, but I usually hit a wall when it comes to discussing the use of recent advances - possibly just due to commercial sensitivities. However supplier 'figures' and descriptions don't always tell the whole truth without a great deal of digging and evaluation phases.
Regards
Paul