new SGI Origin & Onyx 3k?

[Kragen Sitaker]

"W Bauske" bloviates:
> Exactly how often do you think people want to run 1000 nodes on
> a single problem? When was the last time you did that?
> 
> Realistically, the majority of parallel jobs are in range 4-128 
> processors, depending on what you want to do and how the code scales. 
> SGI's do fine in that space. So do other non-beowulf systems or
> no one with sense would buy them.

   "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." 
       - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

Presumably people were getting by with tabulating machines and desk
calculators when he made this remark.

He probably would have been right.  Except that computers vastly
increased the market for calculations by decreasing their cost.

Numerically, the majority of parallel jobs are probably "in the range
of" 2 processors, and probably always will be.  That doesn't make
4-processor machines or 1000-processor machines useless.

-- 
<kragen at pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves        
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]