[Beowulf] Roadrunner shutdown

[Vincent Diepeveen]

In this case we were discussing roadrunner and the CELL processors  
used there exclusively for nuke explosions.
That's a very specific user case.

Now all that code as i understand it that ran there was classified  
codes - so i suppose possible reports will be kept secret as well.

Yet it would be naive to assume that they ran small batch jobs on  
that machine - in short optimizing the codes really low level for  
that hardware
must have been pretty much worth the effort.

Anything that wants to run using less than some large number of CELL  
processors, say 1024 or so, i wouldn't have given permission to run  
at all
at such massive supercomputer - to give an example. Let those toy at  
some CPU's at home.




On Apr 4, 2013, at 5:39 PM, Max R. Dechantsreiter wrote:

> Vincent,
>
>> It doesn't matter whether you code for blue gene, cuda or phi - from
>> a software viewpoint it's all vector type coding you've got to do.
>> the price of 1 coder is total peanuts compared to
>> the price of those supercomputers. So specialistic written software
>> is what you need anyway.
>
> Simply porting an application shouldn't take much effort,
> as long as vendor-specific libraries aren't involved.
> However, special and sometimes intensive efforts are often
> required to achieve good performance (high utilization).
>
> The unfortunate fact is that funds are more easily spent
> on hardware than on the human resources needed to utilize
> them effectively.
>
> Max
> ---
> http://www.linkedin.in/in/benchmarking