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News From Super Computer 99
Donald "I fixed Rob's X Key" Becker wrote in to report from that other conference that is happening right now: Super Computing 99. Reports and picture of the freebies, the parties, and a somewhat surprising extra little sponsor.
Imagine a full-page ad:
The Free Beer is brought to your by Microsoft; the Free Speech is brought to you by the FSF.
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It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've sugggested this before; I think it would be great! There really are more productive uses for moderator points as currently distributed, though -- but it would be great to have some counterbalance to malicious jerks
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If you should chance to read the several identical postings here, they're all the same taunt. At least he's honest - he wants to make people waste their moderator points.
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Moderating down an anonymous coward is probably a worse way to use your points than using them to bump up the things you think deserve to be seen.
Besides, Natalie Portman probably doesn't have *both* of the things this guy attributes to her in his own ee cummings semi-referential kind of way
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Yes, but if we've learned anything from the overclocked 247MHz 486SX (which we haven't), it's that hard liquor makes computers run much faster than beer.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Just before the party, Eadline was approached by Tod Needham of Microsoft Research who suggested that he would like Microsoft to help underwrite the party. A quick meeting by the organizers was held on the trade show floor to discuss the various political and community consequences of accepting money from Microsoft until it was pointed out that "We can buy more beer with the money".
So the secret comes out eh? It turns out Beowulf clusters are run on BEER!
I've done some research, and it seems that: (Lots of comps) + (Lots of beer) + Beowulf > (Lots of comps) + Beowulf alone.
The reason for this is that beer was shown to actually do the opposite for computers as it does for men. It INCREASES memory and speed, meaning male computers no longer have an excuse for not remembering that ugly looking female's phone number.
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
MS sponsorship does seems suspect. It's funny though, someone else pointed out Microsoft Research is an "intellectual roach motel"--they've been spending enormous sums hiring every academician they can throughout this decade, and have not one achievement to show for it.
You can't have a supercomputer without...
DAS BLINKEN LIGHTS!!!
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Here's the Supercomputing Con web site.
Interesting that SGI and Cray had seperate displays... I would hope it was just to appeal to the Cray crowd...
More notes please! Thanks for the first report!
-S. Louie
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
Hmm, a search of all these comments yields no hits on "mosix". Hmm. Never heard of mosix, eh? Well, take a look at http://www.mosix.org Mosix offers transparent mid-execution migration of processes and dynamic load balancing. The kernel is made aware of the cluster rather than the user processes. I tried it out the other day, (the installation was pretty simple, the only problems I had had nothing to do with mosix) and I have to say it's pretty impressive. I'm by no means an expert, but mosix does seem a lot cooler to me than beowulf, at least from what I've seen and read. Once installed and set up, you can just kind of forget about it and it automatically moves processes around from node to node *while they are running* to balance the load on the cluster, totally transparently. Really cool. You can of course manually direct process migration.