Hey team Beowulf, So most of you know that I headed out from being the research computing guy at Harvard to join Cycle Computing last month. It's been a fun first few weeks, what with 10,000+ server instances pinging up in hours flat and doing some stunning science to boot!
Anyway, I noticed the "Utility Supercomputing" concept had been written up recently over at HPCwire: http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-02-28/utility_supercomputing_heats_up.html I, as most of you, always give a big hairy technical eyeball to any statements that include MPI and "cloud". I know I'm biased, but I do think Jason does a great job of explaining "the bench", i.e. never assume raw horsepower until you test it! Always reminds me of those 1,000bhp motors that are only great in straight lines ;-) Another thing to think of is total cost per unit of science. Given we can now exploit much larger systems than some of us have internally, are we are starting to see overhead issues of vanish due to massive scale, certainly at cost? I know for a fact that what we call "Pleasantly Parallel" workloads all of this holds true, certainly results in lower cost per unit science at massive scale for those grand challenge "PP" problems. I personally think the game is starting to change a little bit yet again here... So at the risk of being moderately contentious: straw poll - what do we think as a team about these issues? j. Dr. James Cuff Chief Technology Officer Cycle Computing *Leader in Utility Supercomputing and Cloud HPC Software* cell: 617.429.5138 main: 888.292.5320 skype: cycle.james.cuff web: http://www.cyclecomputing.com <http://www.cyclecomputing.com> <http://www.cyclecomputing.com>
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