[Beowulf] Pony: not yours.

[Mark Hahn]

> 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

sure - such suggestions are pretty easy to put together, but they do not 
answer the question: should it be done, and at what cost?  I still think
they're really being used as a fig-leaf to cover the erection people get 
when imagining the "next-a-scale" facility.

simulations like this are extremely dubious in that they're fundamentally
limited by the quality of raw configuration data.  it is emphatically not 
clear that neuroscience is primarily limited by the scale of machines to 
run simulations.

>> 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.

even retail, fully-delivered rates here are half that.  but out of curiosity,
does your comment mean that you, for instance, buy arm clusters, or at least 
LV versions of x86 chips (and high-core, low-clock models), gold/platinum
PSUs, etc?  (or just do your compute in a location with cheaper power?)

regards, mark hahn.