Monday, August 15, 2005

I wonder how fast the Cray runs today

Background: Back in college I took a Fortran class. One of the problems we did was called the Jury problem. Basically you have a large two dimensional array (in this example size 66). Initialize the all the elements to 0 except for row 0 which you initialize to 1.0. Then what you do is iterate through the array (except for the boundaries) and each element becomes the average of the four cells around it. For each iteration you take the sum of all the elements and keep iterating until the difference between the sum and the prior sum falls below a given delta (in this case 0.00000000001).

Running this back in 1990 (Yes I know I am carbon dating myself) on an IBM PC in Fortran took 45 minutes. It took 15 minutes to run on a IBM PC AT with a 80287 math coprocessor. Just to see how long it would take one of the graduate lab assistance uploaded the program to the Cray supercomputer at the University of Texas and to upload the program, compile it, run it and download the answers took 8 seconds. Well after 15 years I finally found a personal computer that is just as powerful as the 1990 Cray supercomputer and its the HP laptop I am using to write this post! Its an AMD64 with 2gig of ram and to run the above problem in Java took less than a second.

I love my laptop.

But I wonder how quickly this would run on the latest Cray supercomputer .

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