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IBM CEO Rometty Says Big Data Is the Next Great Natural Resource | 120 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
IBM CEO Rometty Says Big Data Is the Next Great Natural Resource
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 08 2013 @ 02:28 PM EST
> Rometty delivered a crystal clear message about the new age of
> computing that she envisions will revolve around how well companies
> understand massive amounts of data derived from social networks.

I get a different message from you. I think it doesn't matter if you've
got a R-Pi or an 8-core triple screen gamer's delight, they'll get you,
if not from Farcebook, then from Google+, your eBay purchases, ...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

IBM CEO Rometty Says Big Data Is the Next Great Natural Resource
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 08 2013 @ 05:50 PM EST
First, you're not the target customer. You don't have the data processing needs; the websites you use do.

Second, a Raspberry Pi may be interesting technologically, but it is useless at any significant level of performance requirements. If you watch th e University of Southampton's video about building a Raspberry Pi supercomputer, they say it's equivalent to a PII@300MHz in terms of performance. So a dual-core Core i series at 2+ GHz is going to get about 20 times the performance, when you consider the ISA.

Now, bear in mind that IBM deals with quad-core or higher Xeons at 3.6+GHz, and 64-bit, typically multicore, POWER7/POWER8 processors at 3+GHz -- 5.5GHz, with hardware acceleration for most functions. Bear in mind also that that RPi has ~100mbit ethernet on a shared usb2.0 hub, and the memory is DDR2 and the disk is a slow sd card...compared to multiple 10 to 100 gigabit ethernet or infiniband ports, DDR3 with ECC, and pretty fast HDDs or SSDs.
That RPi cluster is going to hit a communication limit pretty quick. Meanwhile, about 80-100 RPi nodes might be equal to one IBM node. When you've hit your limit, an IBM system would still be too small to mention. And it can scale to far more nodes, thanks to the superior IO.
If you're not doing something that parallelizes well, then a cluster won't help you. In that case, you're dealing with ~a single thread on a 32-bit io-limited, memory-constrained armv6 computer at ~700MHz (performance equivalent to a 300MHz 686) compared to one on a 64-bit POWER8 computer at 5.5 GHz.
Um, I think that comparison doesn't bode well for a RPi.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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