[Beowulf] Pony: not yours.

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:28:12AM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:

> - do we need exascale anyway?  would the world be better off with a thousand

Yes, EFlops is entry level for projects like 
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/neurologist-markam-human-brain/all/
and if you want invididually accurate neural emulation
you'll need billions of such facilities, so we're
looking at kW rather MW here.

> petascale machines?  I know the field tends to view this as a kind of
> manifest destiny, but why?  the secondary argument usually devolves to
> something like "well, the high end pushes the envelope so the masses can 
> benefit from trickle-down improvements."  but if this is the main
> justification, it's a bit twisted: we need to make clusters so big that we
> can't afford to power them in order to force ourselves to develop more
> power-efficient systems?  if power is an important TCO component, why aren't
> we optimizing for it already (in any sized facility)?

I definitely do for my private projects, as 0.25 EUR/kWh are
a pretty good argument.