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

[Toon Moene]

Gerry Creager wrote:

> In the US, at least for academic institutions and hobbyists, surface and 
> upper air observations of the sort you describe are generally available 
> for incorporation into models for data assimilation.  Models are 
> generally forced and bounded using model data from other atmospheric 
> models, also available.  As I understand it from colleagues in Europe, 
> getting similar data over there is more problemmatical.

Exactly !  And what happens in Europe is that companies take the freely 
available US data, use it to compete with US companies, and disregard 
the (meteorological superior) ECMWF data, because it is not free.

A colleague of mine held some very unpopular talks in Reading, England, 
about this (according to his figures, 99 % of the meteorological data 
used in Europe originates from the US).

-- 
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