Wu Feng and colleagues Michael Warren and Eric Weigle have developed Green Destiny, the first of this new breed of high-performance, low-cost computers. According to the team, Green Destiny has been reliably operating for more than eight months in a dusty warehouse where temperatures routinely reach 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Everyone's fixed on the mantra of performance at all costs," said Feng. "What we've done is redefine the price-to-performance ratio to look at efficiency, reliability and availability -- in other words, total cost of ownership."

Performance Eats Power

The researchers argue that the costs of computing should include electrical power , infrastructure , air conditioning, floor space, time lost to system failures and salaries for the people needed to keep finicky machines operating. Supercomputers of the future might be similar to Green Destiny, they say: small, extremely stable and miserly in their power use.

Feng told NewsFactor that Green Destiny packs 240 Transmeta processors, each operating at 667 MHz. Currently computing at 160 billion operations per second -- a speed that rivals today's most powerful supercomputer and cluster designs -- it uses less than 10 percent of the electricity and 25 percent of the space of standard supercomputers or clustered systems.

Even more important is its reliability, Feng said. "As the push for performance goes up, so does the power consumption. And system failure is directly proportional to power consumption," he pointed out. "If your machine isn't available all the time, then you can't do any computing."

Space-Conscious Supercomputing

"If we continue along the path of Moore's law, by 2010 we will run into microprocessors having over a billion transistors and dissipating over one kilowatt of thermal energy per square centimeter," said Feng.

According to the researchers, a larger version of Green Destiny would require far less space than a traditional Beowulf cluster. "In simulations, we increased processing power by a factor of 2,000, but the amount of space we needed increased only by a factor of 65," Feng said.

Feng said that on the basis of all of these factors, the price-to-performance rating for Green Destiny would be twice as good as other supercomputers. "Our hope is that those involved in designing supercomputing systems will recognize that we can move toward maintaining reliability and saving space while increasing performance," he said. (continued...)

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