> Haha, I doubt it -- probably the opposite in terms of development cost. > Which is why I question the original statement on the grounds that > "cost" isn't well defined. Maybe the costs just performance-wise, but > that's not even clear to me when we consider things at huge scales.
40 years ago an army of cheap software developers were needed to service a single very expensive box. Now the boxes are super cheap and the price for decent software developers is very high. With hardware, you just have to solve the problem once. With this exascale node failing problem, if we push this problem to software every single application that wants to scale to those heights is going to have to find a way to apply this method and restriction. This approach also hits us very hard in a place where we are hurting the most; in our developers. In Germany, at present, there is I believe a fairly significant net surplus if compute resource as our scientists try to wrap their heads around parallel programming to take advantage of this exponentially increasing resource. Checkpointing to some kind of non volatile disk might work for some codes but its not a universal solution. Some MPI tricks might work for another code. What about QCD codes that are almost completely I/O bound....I cant wrap my head around how either solution would work in that circumstance but then again I am not a computer scientist and have a moderately weak grasp on the mechanics. Its easy to underestimate the golden rule of HPC! "Never underestimate the crappyness of the code!". It is our task to provide a safe an elegant playground for our users so that this crappyness matters a bit less :) > > I think the MapReduce framework actually makes a good case for > (admittedly non-general, fairly sequential workloads) the ability for > software to cheaply and at reasonable performance scale with added > hardware. Don't expect to do any real physics on MR of course, but for > huge data crunches it is quite nice. A /totally/ general framework that > scales on a number of platforms is one of those cure-alls we aren't > likely to see for a decade or three. Just my pessimistic perspective > though :D. > > Best, > > ellis > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf