[Beowulf] Checkpointing using flash

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

Yes indeed.. but I'm hopeful.  50 years ago, FORTRAN was hot stuff compared to assembler; and things like virtual memory, paging, and such were "wouldn't it be nice" kind of ideas.   40 years from now, hopefully, there will be optimizing compilers for 10^9 processing nodes, etc.

Jim Lux

-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 2:11 AM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Checkpointing using flash

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.