Researcher Discusses iPod Supercomputer

schliz writes to mention that in a recent interview with ITNews researcher John Shalf explained the purpose and some of the technical details of the newly-announced "iPod supercomputer." "Microprocessors from portable electronics like iPods could yield low-cost, low-power supercomputers for specialized scientific applications, according to computer scientist John Shalf. Along with a research team from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Shalf is designing a supercomputer based on low-power embedded microprocessors, which has the sole purpose of improving global climate change predictions."

sure, this is how it starts

But sooner or later, they come after you claiming you haven't legally purchased your global climate change predictions, or that you've been sharing them with your friends online.

Re:

"We're sorry, we can only authorise you to share this data with four other nodes. Have a nice day."

Re:sure, this is how it starts

REDMOND, Seattle, Wednesday (UNN Technoporn) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today announced a new era at the Seattle software company, announcing their entry six^Wnine^Wtwelve months hence into the cell phone market with the exciting new Zune Z-Phone, to finally get the company properly into the rapidly changing digital media landscape.

Ballmer, speaking to a group of trained-monkey analysts and cynical bloggers at the company headquarters today, unveiled mockups^Wprototypes of the Z-Phone, which combines the Zune music player (with wifi for "squirting" songs), a CDMA cell phone, a PDA, an eight gigabyte hard disk, a camera, a laser pointer and a bottle opener into one semi-portable device. It will also allow you to "squirt" music to and from your Windows Vista Service Pack 1^W2 Media Center computer.

The product underscores the shift the company has attempted to make in recent years from an office supply company to a consumer electronics darling as it aims not to become utterly obsolete in the digital future. "And even Linux fanboys admit our hardware is pretty nice," Ballmer said before the somewhat sullen and cynical crowd. "It's definitely the best music player we've ever made."

Ballmer called the Z-Phone a revolutionary device that will leapfrog current technology. He said the company expects to sell about 100 million of them next year. "Maybe two hundred million. This is so the coolest music player ever." Unlike the MP3 player market, which the iPod has dominated even with the entrance of Microsoft's Zune two months ago, the cell phone market is much more fragmented. "There is not one device that everyone buys," said completely independent analyst Rob Enderle, "but this fabulous device should trounce all comers. I've ordered three already in anticipation."

Weighing in at only 15 ounces (425 grams), with a 5-inch 640-by-480 pixel screen, the $498 (with three-year $80/month contract) Z-Phone, a rebadged version of the LG Smart Display from 2003 with new firmware, looks like a Classic Brown Zune (to come in mission, chocolate, corduroy and meconium) with a phone touchpad in place of its imitation scroll wheel. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, Pocket Microsoft Office, Pocket Solitaire and Pocket Pool. MSN will supply e-mail, mapping, search and other Internet services to the Z-Phone. It also features an amazing 1.3 megapixel (300,000 pixels interpolated) black and white camera. Battery life is estimated at up to four hours in Microsoft tests.

To better work with its content partners and ensure that you, the user, can rest safe in the knowledge that the artists and their representatives have been paid properly for all their hard work, Microsoft has limited "squirtable" songs to encrypted WMA files purchased from the Zune Music Store, which can be listened to three times or within three days before automatically being deleted from both the Z-Phone and the Media Center computer. Songs may also be "squirted" between two Z-Phones (though not the original Zune) if both are registered with Microsoft as being linked to that installation of Media Center. Users are advised to purchase Microsoft Zune Secure Headphones ($129), which encrypt the signal between the Z-Phone and your ears, as playback quality is degraded on conventional "analog hole" earphones or when playing back unencrypted MP3 files. Phone calls may be made to or received from any number on the network carrier you bought the Z-Phone from, with only a 99-cent charge for humming a song to someone you call or are called by on the phone or ten cents per use of the camera, laser pointer or bottle opener. Microsoft will also pay $20 from each Z-Phone sold to Universal Music. In addition to the ability to "squirt" songs, the user may "squirt" his calls, which are stored on Microsoft Zune Live servers and cost $40 per month to access.

In other news, Ballmer said that Microsoft had reached over 600 music downloads since introducing its Zune Music Store, selling over 70 songs a month. To keep those numbers rising, Ba

Oblig. misleading title

From the article:

"Using the embedded microprocessor technology used in mobile phones, iPods and other consumer electronic devices, the boffins propose a cost-effective machine for running complex computational models."

In other words, all be damned if they decide to implement this monstrosity using actual iPods when they could use their talent to design and build greater efficiency through Spice/HDL, manufactured boards, and a pick-and-place.

Gee, A mesh of dedicated machines, hardcoded for more efficiency than a cluster of bloated pc's designed for MS office is actually more efficient? Geddouttahere!

[/sarcastic rant]

Re:Oblig. misleading title

Of course. iPods have nothing to do with this article at all. A less misleading title would be "Researcher Discusses Microprocessor Supercomputer". The word "iPod" is only there as an eye-catcher.

Re:Oblig. misleading title

You're really dragging down my imagining of a Beowulf cluster of iPods.

Re:

This makes me wonder... could a mobile phone company sell mesh/grid computing power? Lets say you have a special contract with the telco where for a cheaper plan they have the right to download data and crunch it when your phone is not in use.

iPhone

Excuse me if I'm wrong, but would this not be more specifically a mobile microprocessor supercomputer than an iPhone supercomputer? I mean, its not as if only the iPhone uses mobile processors.

Re:

Hahah, oh dear I misread the summary, this is about iPod microprocessors not iPhone microprocessors... excuse me I am quite drunk :P I will see you all in another life, when we are all cats!

Re:

I'm already a cat, you insensitive clod!

how many of those 200 petaflops...

...will be devoted to DRM?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:how many of those 200 petaflops...

It'll be devoted to breaking DRM, the irony will be delicious.

Image a ...

Beowulf cluster of ...I for one welcome our iPod overl....in Soviet Russia, iPods ....does it run....

Please stop hitting me!

Oh, I get it.

1. collect old, broken iPods. 2. assemble iGod. 3. profit.

Let's Do This

Send this article to that Jonathan Zittrain idiot who thinks that putting the web in the hands of everyone everywhere is a failure of technology and will stifle innovation.

It's about the bandwidth, not the MIPS

There's a famous quote about supercomputers that says that supercomputers are really good memory systems, with a bit of CPU tacked on. The hard part isn't adding more MIPS -- we've done that with the massively parallel connection machine -- or even increasing speed. It's about shuttling the data around the computer efficiently so that all ALU's are constantly fed. During the cold war, Control Data had a supercomputer that came in two variants -- one for domestic use, one for export. The difference between them? Same ALU speed, but the domestic one had a scatter/gather memory access capability that sped up big matrix operations.

Re:

That depends on the application. For embarrassingly-parallel tasks [wikipedia.org], such as some weather prediction methods, it's all about the processing power.

I do fairly-embarrassingly-parallel stochastic electronic structure simulations [wikipedia.org], and most of the time (except d

self-fulfilling prophecy

The observer effect: the more energy we consume studying the effect of energy consumption on climate change, the more we'll have to incorporate this factor into our models.

Positive feedback: if the results of these studies are striking enough to merit funding for more research, we'll no doubt consume even more energy to determine the effects of energy consumption on climate change.

Self-fulfilling prophecy: if this positive feedback between funding for climate change research and supercomputing energy consumption is not counteracted by efforts to reduce supercomputing power consumption for climate change research then we're damning ourselves by studying it.

Re:

Well, they said they're trying to increase the accuracy of global warming predictions. I'd think that if that's what they wanted, using low power processors is exactly the wrong idea. I say use the least efficient, highest-power-sucking processors they c

Gotta...

Is that a supercomputer in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

facepalm

What the hell does this have to do with ipods? They're building a supercomputer out of low-power MIPS procs..

embedded processors were, believe it or not, NOT invented by apple. I don't know if its true or not (i doubt it) but I've also heard that there were portable electronics BEFORE the ipod.

This is really cool, but slashot, come-on...most of us here are geeks, we don't need to have the word "ipod" tacked onto the end to indicate that we're talking about something small.

Re:

Better yet, why do they have to talk about iPods and not cellphones. There are plenty more cellphones in the world than iPods, all of them, connected to networks. Most of them, running already Java applications. The platform is already there.

BlueGene/QCDOC vs this?

BlueGenes, and their predecessor, QCDOC [wikipedia.org] supercomputers, already use slightly modified low-power embedded system chips. How is this any different?

its about time we had a climate model

that could predict global warming without first causing it.

Riiight

Not just the title is misleading but the idea associated with it. Last time I checked (ok, that was a while ago), iPods came with ARM7 cores clocked at 80 MHz. Thing is, these CPUs don't have a floating point unit, so unless they write they weather simulators in fixed point arithmetic (lol, right) or go ahead with software floating point emulation (which would slow things down several times) they're not going to use these, they'd rather use more sophisticated stuff like ARM11s or Cortex A8s.