On Thu, 21 Oct 2010, Mark Hahn wrote:
The real beauty of clusters (to me) has always been at least partly the
fact that you could build YOURSELF a cluster, just for your own
research, without having to have major leadership, infrastructure,
space, or other resources.
sure, but the question is: under what circumstances would you want to?
doing beowulf is indeed easy, and for certain scales and cost structures,
cheap. if you have a fairly constant personal demand for resources
(always have 80-100 cores busy), then doing it yourself may still make sense.
but the impetus towards centralization is sharing: if your usage is bursty,
having your own cluster would result in low utilization. and if the same
funding went towards a large, shared facility, your bursts could be higher.
of course, there's still the issue of autonomy - you control your own
cluster. but in a sense, that's really just reflecting (un)responsiveness
on the part of whoever manages the shared resource...
I'm pretty convinced that, ignoring granularity or political issues, shared
resources save a lot in leadership, infrastructure, space, etc.
No real argument -- I just was pointing out the irony...;-)
rgb
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:r...@phy.duke.edu
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