Mark Hahn wrote:
It was PVM that enabled true message passing parallel code to be written
that made a pile of machines (be they Alphas, simple PCs, Sun
I'm not disagreeing, but wonder why PVM is basically extinct now.
that is, why was MPI considered an improvement/replacement?
Marketing by the MPI groups? More to the point, it looked like MPI had
significant backing. I don't know if it was "better" in a technical
sense (though some folks do argue strongly about MPI being "better").
MS knifed IBM over OS/2 (which was a decently designed OS that might
have given Unix a real run for its money) and hence lost out on all the
I worked on OS/2, and it was no peach on the inside, so to speak ;)
It was nice in that I could run huge (at the time) jobs on my 16 MB ram
PC. I remember running on one of those "sparc" units and this PC, and
the PC was about the same speed (molecular dynamics). The brand new
R3000 shiny SGI Indigos with a whopping 192 MB of ram and a huge 1 GB
disk, these were great to work with. Much faster. Could do 100 time
steps of MD in a week.
FWIW, I can do about 1 time step in less than 20 seconds on my laptop
(AMD Athlon 64 2GHz chip)...
it's hard to speculate about what-ifs on a system which had barely
shaken off its initial hw target (12 MHz 286!) by the time it was dropped.
heh... OS2 was quite a bit better than win31. Somewhat better/more
stable than w95/w98. It just never caught on in any meaningful sense.
And about the time it tried to pick up momentum, Linux got to be
installable/useful. I remember my first laptop (self purchased) had a
75 MHz pentium processor, a 2 GB disk, and I ran windows, OS2 and Linux
(RH in the pre-5 days) on there. Pretty soon after that, OS2 fell off.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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