I was reading an article about one of the worlds fastest computers and this is one of the lines which interested me:
To mimic this relatively minuscule amount of brainpower, researchers used the Fujitsu K to connect a total of 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells by 10.4 trillion virtual synapses (with 24 bytes of memory in each synapse). In total, this added up to around one petabyte of memory, which is the equivalent of about 250,000 standard PCs. And remember, all that's still just one percent of what your brain does every single day, in the time it takes to blink a few times.
So this implies that those supercomputers use normal desktop memory but with much more quantity (250k times more) than a normal desktop?
I read this popular question here on SuperUser. It tells us also something about SRAM - the RAM that CPU's use for cache because it's much faster than normal DRAM.
So I looked here and this line seems to be interesting:
The only reason memory sticks don't use SRAM is the cost. Instead of paying $50 for that 256MB chip, you would be forking over $500. Ouch.
So SRAM modules are possible (and I won't hide the fact I'm really interested in buying 8GB of SRAM memory for my laptop... but can't find anything)
But now the real question: Do supercomputers use SRAM for their memory or just normal DRAM? And if normal DRAM, why don't they just create SRAM memory for supercomputers, supercomputers cost hell of a lot so what difference would that few extra million bucks make?