[Beowulf] how Google warps your brain

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2010, Joe Landman wrote:

> Maybe HPC needs to be its own department, then it can fight for its own 
> budgets.  Have a supercomputing institute (ala MSI at U Minnesota) provide 
> leadership, infrastructure, space, resources.  Its a model that could work at 
> different scales for other universities.

Of course (he chimes in from the bleachers where he is quietly sitting
and wishing he were drinking a beer while watching students -- also
wishing they were drinking a beer -- take a physics exam:-) this simply
puts the world back where it was so long ago before the beowulf concept
was invented...

The real beauty of clusters (to me) has always been at least partly the
fact that you could build YOURSELF a cluster, just for your own
research, without having to have major leadership, infrastructure,
space, or other resources.

Just something to think about...;-)

Now, back to the bleachers.  No, I'm not dead, only teaching an enormous
and time consuming physics course and not doing any computing at all at
the moment, not even the computing I would LIKE to be doing....

     rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu