Melting all the hardships and incompatibleness in building a RAMP, Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors, computer, developers are slowly moving close to make their dream that cropped up in 2004 a reality. Developing new computer architecture is just like creating a new planet and giving it life too, because it’s not easy to gel the hardware designers and software developers together.
In RAMP, developers are aiming to carve out a laboratory computer out of field programmable gate arrays and reprogrammable chips. Patterson, professor of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, says, “If you can put 25 CPUs in one FPGA, you can put 1,000 CPUs in 40 FPGAs” as it’s easy to assemble FPGA-based RAMP computer. Though it’ll cost around $100,000, but will take less space and only 1.5 kilowatts of power.
And if go on to make a similar computing cluster, it will take $2 million, 12 racks and 120 kilowatts.
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