Opinions
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- Written by Douglas Eadline
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- Written by Douglas Eadline
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Feel like ranting about something, I do
Good information about HPC clusters is hard to find. Not only is the market relatively small, but clusters are often home grown affairs that are off the radar screens of traditional market watchers. How then do we find out information on clusters? This very question prompted me, in the past, to place small single question polls on the ClusterWorld.com website (now inactive). And, because I like to test the validity of the prevailing notion of the day, I will continue to do small non-scientific polling here on ClusterMonkey. And, trust me here, the poll results, just add another log to that raging HPC fire called the Top500 debate (For the brave, search for "Top500" in the Beowulf Archives to get a taste of the debate.)
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- Written by Stanley C. Ahalt and Kathryn L. Kelley
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Roll up your blue sleeves and get to work.
From an industrial perspective, HPC seems to be a "look, but don't touch" technology. While there is an acknowledged need for HPC by many industrial sectors, the HPC market has traditionally focused on the grand challenge or the "heroic" computing needs of the National Labs and Computing centers. Stan Ahalt, Executive Director of The Ohio Supercomputer Center, and Kathryn L. Kelley believe a focus on Blue Collar™ Computing can help revitalize industrial innovation and usher in a new era of "high touch" HPC.
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- Written by Douglas Eadline
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If it was easy everybody would be doing it, right? And what about those multi-cores?
Update: Microsoft has released their Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and the Beowulf list is again actively discussing this topic. In addition, previous postings on the Beowulf Mailing List (Look for "Why I want a Microsoft cluster...") discussed the entry of Microsoft into the HPC cluster space. I found the discussions interesting and well informed. I did however, take a step back to look at some fundamentals that define the HPC (High Performance Computing) market and came to the conclusion that before anyone "takes over anything", there are some issues that need to be addressed.
The fundamental issue is that doing HPC is hard. There is no easy way around and no shortcuts. Practitioners need to roll up their sleeves and work to get the performance and results they desire. Unless Microsoft has some magic, all the corporate Windows goodness will not help them in this arena. Just like everybody else they will have to roll up their sleeves. And, by the way, money cannot necessarily buy magic. For the record, that is all I'm going to say about Microsoft because, in my opinion, the things holding back HPC have little to do with the plumbing and a lot to do with the fundamentals. If you are looking for an anti-Microsoft rant, this is wrong article. Please stop reading.
Update: Joe Landman has some great follow-up comments at scalability.org.
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- Written by Douglas Eadline
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Some thoughts, some opinions, and some things to ponder
I'm sitting in the overflow room for the Bill Gates Keynote at Supercomputing '05 (SC05). Odd, his talk is being given in a medium sized room, I am told they have bigger rooms in the convention center. Ah, but why risk empty seats. First, let me say how bazaar this is. Bill Gates at SC, like the CEO of Pepsi addressing the Coke shareholders meeting, no it is worse, it is like Terrel Owens explaining the word humble to the Dali Lama. The term non sequitur comes to mind.
At first, I thought, why go. What could Bill Gates possibly tell the people who have pioneered high performance computing. But then, my curiosity got the better or me. You know, mixing unknowns. Alchemy is interesting. New science if you will.
