[Beowulf] dollars-per-teraflop : any lists like the Top500?

[Jon Forrest]

On 7/1/2010 9:47 AM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

> Giving it away for free to educational institutions worked for Unix, eh? (at
> least in the long run)

Maybe so, for some definition of "worked".

I don't know how it was at other places, but at
Berkeley, especially in the Computer Science Dept.
where I worked, the presence of certain brands
of equipment was like age rings in trees. By this
I mean that 1991-1993 were the DEC years, 1994-1996
were the HP years, 1997-2000 were the Intel years
(I'm making up these years and vendors).
During these periods the vendors made their
equipment available to us at extremely good
prices. Then, something would happen that
caused the vendors to loose interest, and
another vendor would gain interest.

In our case, I think part of the reason why
this happened is because the vendors wanted
access to the professors and grad students
involved in the research projects seemed
like they would have promising commercial
value, such as RAID, RISC, Postgres, and NOW.

-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu