RAMbus had some nice ideas for boosting bandwidth; albeit attached to an power-thirsty and hot-running CPU. And royalty issues.
SRAM might well be a way forward. CPU cache in some cases is now exceeding 256MB. Would SRAM physically located away from the CPU provide benefit over DDR?
Having spent some time dealing with considerably smaller though still monstrous finite element analysis problems; a giant local machine is a whole lot better than setting up a job on a cluster when it comes to performance. Bandwidth for the volume of data involved was our bottleneck. Shedloads of RAM; of the fastest variety available was the biggest performance boost.
If you can't fit what you're doing into a single node (likely - I could chew 4TB with a still relatively simple model) - most of your restrictions will inevitably come from networking. At that point, faster RAM than the network offers diminishing returns.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
