Jim,
You're either an evil genius, or someone with too much free time on your
hands today. I suspect it's probably a little bit of both!
On 11/27/2013 08:23 AM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
From: John Hearns <hear...@googlemail.com <mailto:hear...@googlemail.com>>
Date: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 4:35 AM
To: "beowulf@beowulf.org <mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>"
<beowulf@beowulf.org <mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Docker in HPC
On 27 November 2013 12:29, Tim Cutts <t...@sanger.ac.uk
<mailto:t...@sanger.ac.uk>> wrote:
Yes, Pete, Guy and I have been debating this stuff for some time,
together with some of our informatics coders.
Should virtualisation ever also be necessary (for example to ship ...
to another site to analyse some of their data)
Well why not just clone your informatics coders?
I'm sure you have all the necessary technology at the Sanger Centre -
line up your coders, take a DNA sample,
clone them and send off the clones on low cost airline flights to
where they are needed.
I suppose the nine-month lead time might be a bit problematic from a
project planning point of view.
---
I took a project management class on task planning, and we worked in
fungible work months. (I think the instructor was born after Brooks
wrote his book) Why can you not divide the reproductive work among 9X
workers and get your toilers in a month? OK, I recognize that this
isn't possible today (although see below for a better idea).
Perhaps a bigger concern is the latency from birth to "productive
coder". Is there a potential application of computational chemistry
here to produce pharmacological agents that will reduce that 10 year
latency (minimum) to something smaller? Perhaps with selective
breeding or genetic manipulation? Chickens and cows reach marketable
size much faster today than they used to. Software developers (or STEM
graduates in general) are next. Conceivably, one could reduce the
gestation period as well. These physically smaller coders (make em
smarter faster, but don't waste energy on growing large bodies) will
occupy less space in the office, so we can turn today's space wasteful
cube farms with their 8 foot ceilings into something more reasonable.
Perhaps not to the size of the cages for battery hens, but still
smaller than today's cubicle.
Next, imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Coders. Is not the whole Beowulf
idea based on using commodity components in a large group to achieve
what required an expensive single machine to do before? Think of
this.. No relying on specialists or single great intellects: one can
harness the power of the masses. And you'll get more consistent
intellectual performance. None of that spiky curve of journals per
year stuff to worry about. And you can put your computational units
in locations where environmental conditions favor optimum trades
between productivity and cost. Food and housing is MUCH cheaper in
some places than in others.
In this initial implementation, just as early Beowulfs had to rely on
off the shelf consumer PC on utility shelving, the cluster of coders
would have to use "off the street" computational units in conventional
cubicles. But as described above, we can use pharmacology and
genetic techniques proven in the farming industry to produce more
"purpose designed" computational units, just as modern clusters have
rack mounted processors mounted in customized rack enclosures.
We then come back to the original problem: manufacturing latency..
Here is my proposed solution: we apply clustering at a finer scale,
just as we have done with "manycore" processors incorporating multiple
computational units on one chip. Using commodity wetware, we
aggressively parallelize the production process: Take the DNA, get
that embryo growing in vitro, divide it into a bunch of pieces,
distribute the workload among multiple cores, and then recombine
later. There are a few practical engineering details that remain to
be worked out, but now that I have disclosed the basic idea, I'll make
sure my phone is turned on for the Nobel committee's call next November.
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