Supercomputing: Raw Power vs. Massive Storage

securitas writes "The NY Times reports that a pair of Microsoft researchers are challenging the federal policy on funding supercomputers. Gordon Bell and Jim Gray argue that the money would be better spent on massive storage instead of ultra-fast computers because they believe today's supercomputing centers will be tomorrow's superdata centers. They advocate building cheap Linux-based Beowulf clusters (PCs in parallel) instead of supercomputers." NYTimes free reg blah blah.

Comments

Hell, if we're going to talk all SERIOUS and shit

[Bold Marauder]

You have to wonder why, all things seriously being equal, they don't recommend a *BSD-based solution instead of a Linux-based one. Esp given the near-equivalent functionality of the *BSDs, and the fact that MS has publicly endorsed the BSD license in the past, citing it as an superior alternative to the GNU License.

Re:Microsoft recommending Linux Beowolf cluster?

[cvdwl]

"Try using a Beowulf-style cluster for a CFD problem, and watch as all computation grinds to a halt as your processors and interconnects devote all their capacity to inter-node coherency and synchronization."

B...S...; we use a small Beowulf (16 dual 1 GHz PIII boards with a fast ethernet backplane from PSSC) for oceanic numerical modeling and the problem scaled almost perfectly with number of processors.

Our models are 3-dimensional, but sudivision and message passing takes place only in the horizontal two-D direction. And message passing only needs to account for the boundary nodes.

Ease of use is a bit of a larger issue, however. For convenience sake I usually end up running at home on the dual Athlon and then doing big runs and batch jobs on the Beowulf.