Recently folks at MIT demonstrated a 96 core ARM cluster which runs entirely on solar energy[1]. The total power consumption of the entire cluster was around 200 watts.
Detailed figures about the performance are yet to come. I am particularly interested to find out how the system scales in terms of FLOPs/Watt.
I don't know whether the word "weak scaling" is right to use here or not, in my view the idea is the same, i.e if on one machine or core the system achieves x flops per watt will it retain that number if more machines or cores are added? That is to say x flops per watt using two cores or 96 cores etc. Now that's an ideal case to retain the same performance of previous configuration while adding more resources. It will decrease but how much? And especially keeping in mind the kind of workloads.
I am trying to make some educated guesses based on a prior experience with such kind of configuration[2]. I will share them here as I finish .... But for the moment those two articles in the reference section are a must read.
ref:
Detailed figures about the performance are yet to come. I am particularly interested to find out how the system scales in terms of FLOPs/Watt.
I don't know whether the word "weak scaling" is right to use here or not, in my view the idea is the same, i.e if on one machine or core the system achieves x flops per watt will it retain that number if more machines or cores are added? That is to say x flops per watt using two cores or 96 cores etc. Now that's an ideal case to retain the same performance of previous configuration while adding more resources. It will decrease but how much? And especially keeping in mind the kind of workloads.
I am trying to make some educated guesses based on a prior experience with such kind of configuration[2]. I will share them here as I finish .... But for the moment those two articles in the reference section are a must read.
ref:
[1] Building A 96-Core Ubuntu ARM Solar-Powered Cluster
[2] 12-Core ARM Cluster Benchmarked Against Intel Atom, Ivy Bridge, AMD Fusion http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=phoronix_effimass_cluster&num=1
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