Commodity supercomputing, was: Re: NDAs Re: [Beowulf] Nvidia, cuda, tesla and... where's my double floating point?

[Jon Aquilina]

not sure if this applies to all kinds of senarios that clusters are used in
but isnt the more ram you have the better?

On 6/30/08, Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> Toon,
>
> Can you drop a line on how important RAM is for weather forecasting in
> latest type of calculations you're performing?
>
> Thanks,
> Vincent
>
>
> On Jun 30, 2008, at 8:20 PM, Toon Moene wrote:
>
> Jim Lux wrote:
>>
>> Yep.  And for good reason.  Even a big DoD job is still tiny in Nvidia's
>>> scale of operations. We face this all the time with NASA work.
>>>  Semiconductor manufacturers have no real reason to produce special purpose
>>> or customized versions of their products for space use, because they can
>>> sell all they can make to the consumer market. More than once, I've had a
>>> phone call along the lines of this:
>>> "Jim: I'm interested in your new ABC321 part."
>>> "Rep: Great. I'll just send the NDA over and we can talk about it."
>>> "Jim: Great, you have my email and my fax # is..."
>>> "Rep: By the way, what sort of volume are you going to be using?"
>>> "Jim: Oh, 10-12.."
>>> "Rep: thousand per week, excellent..."
>>> "Jim: No, a dozen pieces, total, lifetime buy, or at best maybe every
>>> year."
>>> "Rep: Oh...<dial tone>"
>>> {Well, to be fair, it's not that bad, they don't hang up on you..
>>>
>>
>> Since about a year, it's been clear to me that weather forecasting (i.e.,
>> running a more or less sophisticated atmospheric model to provide weather
>> predictions) is going to be "mainstream" in the sense that every business
>> that needs such forecasts for its operations can simply run them in-house.
>>
>> Case in point:  I bought a $1100 HP box (the obvious target group being
>> teenage downloaders) which performs the HIRLAM limited area model *on the
>> grid that we used until October 2006* in December last year.
>>
>> It's about twice as slow as our then-operational 50-CPU Sun Fire 15K.
>>
>> I wonder what effect this will have on CPU developments ...
>>
>> --
>> Toon Moene - e-mail: toon at moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phone: +31 346 214290
>> Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
>> At home: http://moene.indiv.nluug.nl/~toon/
>> Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2008-01/msg00009.html
>>
>
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-- 
Jonathan Aquilina
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