The research and development of new simulator with thousands of CPU PC only $100 thousand

On February 25th news, according to one of the pioneers of RISC architecture, University of California at Berkeley electrical engineering professor Dave Patterson said that in the development of a new computer architecture, hardware designers and software developers to develop synchronization is very difficult.

According to the CNET News.com website reported, Patterson said, hardware development takes a few years. The related software should be carried out after the hardware development. Although there are simulators, however, software developers do not like to use this simulator. This makes the development cycle longer.

Into the multiprocessor research accelerator (RAMP) topic. This program is based on FPGA (field programmable gate array) chip to produce a test of the computer. This programmable chip can be reset to different chips. FPGA chip based on RAMP computer assembly cost is very cheap and very convenient.

At a seminar held at the University of California at Berkeley, Patterson said that if you can add 25 processors on a FPGA chip, you can add up to 1000 processors on the FPFA chip. He estimated that the cost of the computer would cost about $100 thousand. This powerful computer occupies an area of relatively small, equivalent to only 1/3 of a rack area, power consumption of only 1.5 kilowatts.

Equivalent to the computing power of the computer cluster costs about $2 million, takes up 12 racks, power consumption of 120 kilowatts.

The idea of making a RAMP computer was presented at a meeting in 2004. This idea is becoming reality. Patterson said that a configuration of 8 computing modules of the computer will be completed in the first half of 2006, a configuration of all 40 modules of the computer will be completed in the second half of next year. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other schools.

'we're not building a FPGA supercomputer,' Patterson said. We're trying to build a simulator system.