[Beowulf] Checkpointing using flash

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 09:29:25PM +0000, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

> I think the future is in explicitly recognizing that you have to pass
> messages serially and designing algorithms that are tolerant of things
> like missing messages, variable (but bounded) latency (or heck, latency at
> all).

Computational physics pretty much demands this. 
 
> Once you've got a generalized fast approach using message passing, it's
> very scalable.

But the human programming doesn't scale across 10^6
to asynchronous 10^9 nodes with <GByte of memory each 
and where determinism is computationally more expensive
than stochastical good-enough result.

Of course the physical modelers won't bat an eyelash,
but the common programmer who still tries to figure out
this multithreading thing will be out to lunch.