[Beowulf] I'm so glad I didn't buy one of these

Jeff Johnson jeff.johnson at aeoncomputing.com
Wed Jul 2 16:53:55 PDT 2014


To me it seems that the top lines of the Top500 list have become more
about nation-state appendage measuring than about real science.

China spiked the ball squarely in jump-the-shark territory. Tianhe-2
will likely end up like most of the venues built for the Beijing Summer
Olympics.


On 7/2/14, 4:48 PM, Joseph Landman wrote:
> On Jul 2, 2014, at 7:31 PM, James Cuff <james_cuff at harvard.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Let this be a lesson to us all.
>
> Repeat after me:
>
> "Top 500 scores mean nothing!"
>
>
>
> But ... But ... Shiny ... Precious ...
>
> Please pardon brevity and typos ... Sent from my iPhone
>
> As a community we have to stop this madness!  100k / day.  Sigh.
>
>
> Now just get all those writing rfps to stop with the madness.  The number
> and it's pursuit are one of the more significant causes of entropy (as in
> waste heat generation ) as I have ever seen.  A dubious metric at best with
> extremely limited, if any, correlation to end user realizable performance.
>
>
>
> J.
>
> On Wednesday, July 2, 2014, Jeff Johnson <jeff.johnson at aeoncomputing.com>
> wrote:
>
>> $100,000 (USD) per day to operate, users get billed.
>>
>>     "It's like a giant with a super body but without the software to
>>     support its thinking soul," Chi said. Some users would need years or
>>     even a decade to write the necessary code, he added.
>>
>> Ouch...
>>
>> On 7/2/14, 2:21 PM, "C. Bergström" wrote:
>>> On 07/ 3/14 04:17 AM, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>>>> If they want to spend a bazillion dollars to run hpl faster than anyone
>>>> else who am I to stop them.
>>>>
>>>> If however they want to do real science perhaps they need to architect
>>>> something more manageable.
>>>>
>>>> They should bust that thing up into 3 or 4 clusters.
>>>>
>>>> On 7/2/14, 2:11 PM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
>>>>> China's world-beating supercomputer fails to impress some potential
>>>>> clients
>>>>>
>>>>>
>> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1543226/chinas-world-beating-supercomputer-fails-imp
>>> replied too fast the above link gets cut
>>> So paste "ress-some-potential-clients" at the end or here it is again
>>>
>> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1543226/chinas-world-beating-supercomputer-fails-impress-some-potential-clients
>>>
>>

-- 
------------------------------
Jeff Johnson
Co-Founder
Aeon Computing

jeff.johnson at aeoncomputing.com
www.aeoncomputing.com
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