With the fastest supercomputers on the planet sporting multi-megawatt appetites, green HPC has become all the rage. The IBM Blue Gene/Q machine is currently number one in energy-efficient flops, but a new FPGA-like technology brought to market by semiconductor startup eASIC is providing an even greener computing solution. And one HPC project in Japan, known as GRAPE, is using the chips to power its newest supercomputer.

GRAPE, which stands for Gravity Pipe, is a Japanese computing project that is focused on astrophysical simulation. (More specifically, the application uses Newtonian physics to compute the interaction of particles in N-body systems). The project, which began in 1989, has gone through eight generations of hardware, all of which were built as special-purpose supercomputer systems.

Each of the GRAPE machines was powered by a custom-built chip, specifically designed to optimize the astrophysical calculations that form the basis of the simulation work. The special-purpose processors were hooked up as external accelerators, using more conventional CPU-based host systems, in the form or workstations or servers, to drive the application.

The first-generation machine, GRAPE-1, managed just 240 single precision megaflops in 1989. The following year, the team build a double precision processor, which culminated in the 40-megaflop GRAPE-2. In 1998, they fielded GRAPE-4, their first teraflop system. The most recently system, GRAPE-DR, was designed to be a petascale machine, although its TOP500 entry showed up in 2009 as an 84.5 teraflop cluster.

Even though the GRAPE team was able to squeeze a lot more performance out of specially built hardware than they would have using general-purpose HPC machinery, it's an expensive proposition. Each GRAPE iteration was based on a different ASIC design, necessitating the costly and time-consuming process of chip design, verification, and production. And as transistor geometries shrunk, development costs soared.

As the GRAPE team at Hitotsubashi University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology began planning the next generation, they decided that chip R&D could take up no more than a quarter of system's cost. But given the escalating expense of processor development, they would overshoot that by a wide margin. In 2010, they estimated it would take on the order of $10 million to develop a new custom ASIC on 45nm technology. So when it came time for GRAPE-8, the engineers were looking for alternatives.

The natural candidates were GPUs and FPGAs, which offer a lot of computational horsepower in an energy-efficient package. Each had its advantages: FPGAs in customization capability, GPUs in raw computing power. Ultimately though, they opted for a technology developed by eASIC, a fabless semiconductor company that offered a special kind of purpose-built ASIC, based on an FPGA workflow.

The technology had little grounding in high performance computing, being used mostly in embedded platforms, like wireless infrastructure and enterprise storage hardware. But the GRAPE designers were impressed by the efficiency of the technology. With an eASIC chip, they could get the same computational power as an FPGA for a tenth of the size and at about a third of the cost.

And although the latest GPUs were slightly more powerful flop-wise than what eASIC could deliver, power consumption was an order of magnitude higher.

HOW AND WHY YOUTUBE IS THE FUTURE OF WEB DELIVERED TV CONTENT 

My young friend recently tried to call one of our older relatives. He dialed the number and quickly hung up with a confused look on his face. I asked him what was wrong and he replied, “I don’t know. There’s something wrong with their phone, it kept beeping.” I called the number and was amused to hear a landline busy signal, something my cell phone centric pre-teen had never encountered.....

My son is similarly unacquainted with cable TV. Other than the occasional NBA game, he consumes his video content via our iPad and Xbox. Most of his online viewing is spent on YouTube. He is not alone.

Mark Suster, fellow venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, has written extensively about YouTube’s evolution from dogs-on-skateboards to its current status as an entertainment medium rivaling cable television networks. Mark provides an excellent primer regarding the future of Internet TV HERE.

YouTube has over 800 million monthly unique visitors who consume over 4 billion videos EACH DAY. Its evolution has resulted in a new class of entertainment entrepreneur, the creators of professional YouTube content, affectionately known as YouTubers.

Feeding The New Networks

Running an immensely profitable business has many benefits, including the ability to jumpstart an ecosystem which directly drives revenue to one of your core offerings. During the latter half of 2011, Google awarded a number of leading YouTubers and nascent Internet TV networks grants of $1 million to $2 million. Although estimates of Google’s total investment vary, the industry insiders I spoke with believe it exceeded $100 million. Earlier this month, Google announced that it will spend an additional $200 million to promote YouTube content.

Despite the snarky rumors that Google’s content development program was poorly managed at its outset (e.g., some of the money was spent by YouTubers to purchase homes and not create videos), the majority of the funds were properly deployed by the emerging community of professional YouTubers. In fact, all of the most prominent Internet TV networks were recipients of such grants, including: Maker Studios, Big Frame, Machiniml and FullScreen.

Before the creation of YouTube networks, a handful of leading YouTubers were generating over $100,000 in revenue per year, simply by running run-of-site YouTube ads. Networks have significantly increased YouTubers’ advertising revenue by negotiating sponsorships and large ad purchases with major brands.

Rather than simply act as old-world talent agencies, Internet TV networks offer their talent a number of differentiating advantages which are difficult for YouTubers to secure on their own, including:

Critical Mass – Even though some of the most successful YouTubers routinely generate several million views per video, large advertisers are challenged to spend efficiently within the medium, because even millions of views results in a relatively small advertising spend.