[Beowulf] why we need cheap, open learning clusters

[Jonathan Aquilina]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>
> On May 12, 2013, at 7:55 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > I just ran across an interesting anecdote (in Malcolm Gladwell's
> > "Outliers").  It's in the context of Bill Joy, who commented that
> > using timesharing and interactive systems compared to traditional
> > batch/card deck submission was like speed chess vs chess by mail.
> > That interactivity facilitated his spending thousands of hours
> > working with software.
>
> > [snip]
>
> > I am a BIG believer in personal computing…
> >
>
> It's funny that you mention chess and personal computing at the same
> time.
>
> Now i ran in 2003 Diep at a supercomputer. Diep is a chessprogram.
>
> With respect to the previous mail i wrote regarding the university
> Utrecht, until recently neary every year in the top50 universities of
> this planet,
> it's interesting to mention that at university, after a while i was
> allowed to run my chessprogram.
>
> Yet other students when they tried to launch my chessprogram, it got
> killed.
> Official reason given: it was eating too much RAM.
>
> In fact it was eating 8 MB ram. All machines had 64MB ram or more.
> Reason to eat 8 MB is that i had discovered this to run a lot faster
> at the unix machines (partly HP 60Mhz).
>
> Not sure whether this had to do with a caching issue of the processor
> or other circumstances.
>
> Yet i argue that centralized supercomputing is really slow way to
> develop your software. Personal computing is simply a faster way to
> develop your codes.
>
> The real disadvantage of supercomputers is that you always have to
> wait for weeks if not months for a batch of a few hours to get executed.
> In that sense supercomputing is a lot slower than chess by mail,
> where you have 1 day a move on average.
>

Vincent then why not develop your project for BOINC at least its
distributed computing, yes youll still have to wait for the results but its
getting crunched on either a graphics card or cpu depends on how you code
it.
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