[Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Peter St. John]

I propose we bifurcate into two threads (both of which may be done!).

1. Thesis: 64 bit good. We are all agreed now, case closed, IMO.

2. Thesis: no group of human beings will ever directly author source code
(meant to compile together) in excess of 4GB.

I think we agree with RGB that 2 is irrelevant to 1. It may have some
amusement value of it's own however, as RGB seems adamant to agree with Jon
that 2) is true, when I have already proven it is false :-) So if we want to
debate (2), independently of any concern about which CPU, 32 or 64, to
choose for clusters, then by all means bring it on :-)
As Spock said in the "everyone is Evil parallel-universe" episode, "I have
friends, and some of them are LOGICIANS".

Incidentally, I had been, before this thread, sceptical about 64 bit myself.
The killer app for me was RGB's reminder that it is good to fit an integer
in a register. I astonished myself that my computer-brain had always
interpreted 64-bit as the addressable space, subsuming my numerology-brain
which could care less. So thanks for kicking me out of that prejudice. Also,
my mind is a bit expanded now about what all the register might like to
consider as in it's addressable range; and that's certainly more than 32
bit, altho in that sense 64 still seems kinda profligate to me.

But sure a team of humans can, will, and in some sense already has, and
maybe even literally already has, written more or less coherent source >
4GB. Not that it matters to the word-size issue, which it does not.

Peter
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