By: forestlaughing (forestlaughing.delete@this.yahoo.com), October 19, 2012 9:38 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Robert Myers (rbmyersusa.delete@this.gmail.com) on October 16, 2012 7:28 am wrote:
> If your answer to every query about why you are not building
> better computers is that you can't, then my response to every claim made by
> everyone in the business is that you should stop building *bigger* computers
> until you know how to build *better* computers.
Well, I don't build the computers, I write software that has to run on them. Most of my customers have much smaller clusters, but that it not terribly germane to the discussion.
My argument is that *bigger* computers ARE *better* computers, at least for solving some problems. I agree with you that they are not better for solving all problems. Do all problem scale to 10000 nodes? No, but several important problems do. Many more important problems scale to 500 nodes, and there are substantial advantages to having 1 10k node system, as compared to 20 systems, each with 500 nodes. These big systems are very good at solving some of the worlds pressing problems, just not the problems you care about.
You also misrepresent, to a degree, my main point. It is not that high bandwidth computers can't be constructed, it's just that doing so is very expensive, and the people who would like such computers are unwilling to provide the money necessary to engineer, and also construct them. If you want high bandwidth computers, they can be built, you just have to bring a BIG bag of money to the table. It's been done in the past, but these huge clusters solve enough of the problems, and for relatively little money, that most users learn to live with what they can afford.
> If your answer to every query about why you are not building
> better computers is that you can't, then my response to every claim made by
> everyone in the business is that you should stop building *bigger* computers
> until you know how to build *better* computers.
Well, I don't build the computers, I write software that has to run on them. Most of my customers have much smaller clusters, but that it not terribly germane to the discussion.
My argument is that *bigger* computers ARE *better* computers, at least for solving some problems. I agree with you that they are not better for solving all problems. Do all problem scale to 10000 nodes? No, but several important problems do. Many more important problems scale to 500 nodes, and there are substantial advantages to having 1 10k node system, as compared to 20 systems, each with 500 nodes. These big systems are very good at solving some of the worlds pressing problems, just not the problems you care about.
You also misrepresent, to a degree, my main point. It is not that high bandwidth computers can't be constructed, it's just that doing so is very expensive, and the people who would like such computers are unwilling to provide the money necessary to engineer, and also construct them. If you want high bandwidth computers, they can be built, you just have to bring a BIG bag of money to the table. It's been done in the past, but these huge clusters solve enough of the problems, and for relatively little money, that most users learn to live with what they can afford.