[Beowulf] Capacity / Capability Computing

[Joe Landman]

Hi Andrew:

   Here are my interpretations (pre-coffee diffusion, so take with a kg 
of NaCl or so ...)

   Capacity is throughput.  How much work per unit time can you push 
through the system.

   Capability is more along the traditional "supercomputing" line ... 
how fast/large can you make a single system.  If you could provide 10 TB 
of physical RAM, and 10**5 cores in a single system image, what sort of 
problems could you tackle?

   Clusters/grids/clouds are capacity, with differing profiles, etc. 
Big vector machines, Cray machines, and others are capability.

Joe


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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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