I'm pretty convinced that, ignoring granularity or political issues, shared
resources save a lot in leadership, infrastructure, space, etc.
OTOH, it's just those granularity and cost accounting issues that led to
Beowulfs being built in the first place.
I'm not really sure I understand what you mean. by "granularity", I just
meant that you can't really have fractional sysadmins, and a rack with 1 node
consumes as much floor space as a full rack. in some sense, smaller clusters
have their costs "rounded down" - there's a size beneath which you tend to
avoid paying for power, cooling, etc. perhaps that's what you meant by cost-
accounting.
but do you think these were really important at the beginning? to me,
beowulf is "attack of the killer micro" applied to parallelism. that is,
mass-market computers that killed the traditional glass-house boxes:
vector supers, minis, eventually anything non-x86. the difference was
fundamental (much cheaper cycles), rather than these secondary issues.
I suspect (nay, I know, but just can't cite the references) that this sort
of issue is not unique to HPC, or even computing and IT. Consider
libraries, which allow better utilization of books, at the cost of someone
else deciding which books to have in stock.
well, HPC is unique in scale of bursting. even if you go on a book binge,
there's no way you can consume orders of magnitude more books as I can,
or compared to your trailing-year average. but that's the big win for HPC
centers - if everyone had a constant demand, a center would deliver only
small advantages, not even much better than a colo site.
And consider the qualitatively
different experience of "browsing in the stacks" vs "entering the call
number in the book retrieval system".. the former leads to serendipity as
you turn down the wrong aisle or find a mis-shelved volume; the latter is
faster and lower cost as far as a "information retrieval" function.
heh, OK. I think that's a bit of a stretch, since your serendipity would
not scale with the size of the library, but mainly with its messiness ;)
get paid for. And this is because they've bought a certain amount of
computational resources for me, and leave it up to me to use or not, as I
see fit.
I find myself using my desktop more and more as a terminal - I hardly
ever run anything but xterm and google chrome. as such, I don't mind
that it's a terrible old recycled xeon from a 2003 project. it would seem
like a waste of money to buy something modern, (and for me to work locally)
since there are basically infinite resources 1ms away as the packet flies...
regards, mark.
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