Commodity supercomputing, was: Re: NDAs Re: [Beowulf] Nvidia, cuda, tesla and... where's my double floating point?

[Toon Moene]

Gerry Creager wrote:

> I'm running WRF on ranger, the 580 TF Sun cluster at utexas.edu.  I can 
> complete the WRF single domain run, using 384 cores in ~30 min wall 
> clock time.  At the WRF Users Conference last week, the number of folks 
> I talked to running WRF on workstations or "operationally" on 16-64 core 
> clusters was impressive.  I suspect a lot of desktop weather forecasting 
> will, as you suggest, become the norm.  The question, then, is: Are we 
> looking at an enterprise where everyone with a gaming machine thinks 
> they understand the model well enough to try predicting the weather, or 
> are some still in awe of Lorenz' hypothesis about its complexity?

This is where I think the pluses of the established meteorological 
society will be: We know how to establish the quality of meteorological 
models, how to compare them, how to dive into their parametrizations to 
figure out the relevant differences and to solve the problems.

Because we know this, we will be sought after.  However, we will be 
working inside the industry that needs this knowlegde, and outside 
academia or institutionalized weather centres.

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon at moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.indiv.nluug.nl/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2008-01/msg00009.html