Toon Moene wrote:
Jim Lux wrote:
Yep. And for good reason. Even a big DoD job is still tiny in
Nvidia's scale of operations. We face this all the time with NASA
work. Semiconductor manufacturers have no real reason to produce
special purpose or customized versions of their products for space
use, because they can sell all they can make to the consumer market.
More than once, I've had a phone call along the lines of this:
"Jim: I'm interested in your new ABC321 part."
"Rep: Great. I'll just send the NDA over and we can talk about it."
"Jim: Great, you have my email and my fax # is..."
"Rep: By the way, what sort of volume are you going to be using?"
"Jim: Oh, 10-12.."
"Rep: thousand per week, excellent..."
"Jim: No, a dozen pieces, total, lifetime buy, or at best maybe every
year."
"Rep: Oh...<dial tone>"
{Well, to be fair, it's not that bad, they don't hang up on you..
Since about a year, it's been clear to me that weather forecasting
(i.e., running a more or less sophisticated atmospheric model to provide
weather predictions) is going to be "mainstream" in the sense that every
business that needs such forecasts for its operations can simply run
them in-house.
Case in point: I bought a $1100 HP box (the obvious target group being
teenage downloaders) which performs the HIRLAM limited area model *on
the grid that we used until October 2006* in December last year.
It's about twice as slow as our then-operational 50-CPU Sun Fire 15K.
I wonder what effect this will have on CPU developments ...
I'm running WRF on ranger, the 580 TF Sun cluster at utexas.edu. I can
complete the WRF single domain run, using 384 cores in ~30 min wall
clock time. At the WRF Users Conference last week, the number of folks
I talked to running WRF on workstations or "operationally" on 16-64 core
clusters was impressive. I suspect a lot of desktop weather forecasting
will, as you suggest, become the norm. The question, then, is: Are we
looking at an enterprise where everyone with a gaming machine thinks
they understand the model well enough to try predicting the weather, or
are some still in awe of Lorenz' hypothesis about its complexity?
gerry
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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