[Beowulf] massive parallel processing application required

[Peter St. John]

Moore's Law (which has grown in scope since Moore) applies to the aggregate
effect of many technologies. Individual techs proceed in fits and starts.
Predictions about FLOPS/dollar seem to be sustainable, but e.g. I predict a
jump in chip density when the price point of vapor deposition manufactured
diamond gets low enough (diamond conducts heat way better than silicon, and
chips are suffering from thermodynamics limits).

When AT&T divested, you could not get a decent telephone anymore; they were
too expensive to make so well. Then after years of crummy phones, suddenly
everyone had a cell-phone just like Captain Kirk's.

Sure I want fiber optics to my house. But maybe the power company will carry
data on the wasted bandwidth of power lines. Keep the faith :-)

Peter


On 2/1/07, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>
> > Not true.  Distributed computing is more and more mainstream.  I think
> too
>
> oh, one other snide comment about grid: I suspect the grid-fad could not
> have happened without the fraud perpetrated by worldcom and others during
> the internet bubble.  in those days, it was popular to claim that the
> network
> was becoming truely ubiquitous and incomprehensibly fast.  for instance:
>
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/grid/library/gr-heritage/#N100A6
>
> I don't know about you, but in the 6 years since then, my home net
> connection has stayed the same speed, possibly a bit more expensive.
> desktop/LANs are still mostly at 100bT, with 1000bT in limited use.
> I do notice that grabbing large files off the net (ftp, RPMs, etc)
> often runs at O(MBps) which is about a 10x improvement over the past
> 10-15 years.  so the doubling time turns out to be more like 3 years
> rather than 9 months.  in-cluster networking has improved somewhat
> faster, but not dramatically so.
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