Fwd: [Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Peter St. John]

I'm a dingbat, I "replied" instead of "reply-to-all-ed"
Peter

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter St. John <peter.st.john at gmail.com>
Date: Apr 11, 2007 11:51 AM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!
To: Jon Forrest <jlforrest at berkeley.edu>

Jon,


On 4/10/07, Jon Forrest <jlforrest at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
>
> But I stand firm on my claim that no human, or group
> of humans, can write a program that requires more than
> 32-bits of text space.


I like to say that proving a theorem is alot like writing a program. I don't
know about the biggest software projects, but the Classification of  Finite
Simple Groups was huge; from Wiki:
"In all, the work comprises tens of thousands of pages in 500 journal
articles by some 100 authors."
My thumbnail guesstimate of how much bytes are in a typical journal page of
mathematics (maybe less than AMSTeX source, but more than 2k of plaintext
prose, because all the symbols have to be expressed as abbreivations...)
suggests that this work, done by humans, amounts to more than 4 GB.
I'm not clear, myself, about the "infinite flat address space", as I want my
data space to be a bit more structured (in my view of the C source, say) and
don't want to care about how it looks to the compiler (as long as the
compiler is happy). However,  the killer app to me is what RGB mentioned; I
know and love numbers that don't fit in one 32-bit word.
Peter

Cordially,
> --
> Jon Forrest
> Unix Computing Support
> College of Chemistry
> 173 Tan Hall
> University of California Berkeley
> Berkeley, CA
> 94720-1460
> 510-643-1032
> jlforrest at berkeley.edu
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