[Beowulf] Tesla systems in Germany?

[Steffen Grunewald]

Thanks John for your thoughts (accidentally they match with mine)

> > I'm looking for someone in Germany who already has access to a Tesla
> > system.
> > I have received a request by a scientist for "a very powerful machine", and
> > would like him to run some tests before spending and possibly wasting
> > money.
> >
> In that case, why not just buy a standard Nvidia graphics card? They run the
> same CUDA code. You can run your tests and get an idea of possible speedups,
> or indeed if the code will run under CUDA, before committing to buy Tesla.

> A "very powerful machine" could mean a lot of things - a cluster with a high
> core count. A large SMP machine with a huge amount of memory. A dedicated
> machine like the QCD calculators.

Since he would have been able to use MPI (at least locally to use the 
available multi-core architecture), and didn't do that, it's still a lot
of linear code. Large memory (but not excessive) - yes. SMP - not really.
Cluster with high core count: this would give the opportunity to do stupid
things on the "several hundreds" scale, but not speed up the single stupid
thing.

> As Vincent says, you need to look at what the code is before hitting the "I
> need Cuda" button.

Sometimes the approach to "throw enough money at a problem, and it will 
resolve itself" is the easier one, compared with the need to power-up your 
brains :( 
Actually, I was facing an outcome of "5% speedup if nothing is done about
code efficiency", and I wouldn't like wasting money for that result - that's
why I was asking for a way to confront that guy with the need to re-work 
his code, you understand?


Thanks for your patience,
 Steffen