On May 12, 2013, at 7:55 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > > > I just ran across an interesting anecdote (in Malcolm Gladwell's > "Outliers"). It's in the context of Bill Joy, who commented that > using timesharing and interactive systems compared to traditional > batch/card deck submission was like speed chess vs chess by mail. > That interactivity facilitated his spending thousands of hours > working with software.
> [snip] > I am a BIG believer in personal computing… > It's funny that you mention chess and personal computing at the same time. Now i ran in 2003 Diep at a supercomputer. Diep is a chessprogram. With respect to the previous mail i wrote regarding the university Utrecht, until recently neary every year in the top50 universities of this planet, it's interesting to mention that at university, after a while i was allowed to run my chessprogram. Yet other students when they tried to launch my chessprogram, it got killed. Official reason given: it was eating too much RAM. In fact it was eating 8 MB ram. All machines had 64MB ram or more. Reason to eat 8 MB is that i had discovered this to run a lot faster at the unix machines (partly HP 60Mhz). Not sure whether this had to do with a caching issue of the processor or other circumstances. Yet i argue that centralized supercomputing is really slow way to develop your software. Personal computing is simply a faster way to develop your codes. The real disadvantage of supercomputers is that you always have to wait for weeks if not months for a batch of a few hours to get executed. In that sense supercomputing is a lot slower than chess by mail, where you have 1 day a move on average. > > > _______________________________________________ > 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
