From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200305081726.h48HQ1525622@augusta.math.psu.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] design clairvoyance & the 9 way In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 07 May 2003 19:46:35 CDT." <3EB9A8EB.3070100@ameritech.net> From: Dan Cross Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 13:26:01 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a4e3e90a-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > Isn't that kind of like what Bill Gates said... something > about "640 kilobytes should be enough"... No, it's more like saying, ``wow, we can remove a lot of complexity that we may not need, since machines are so fast there's no need for it anymore.'' Kind of like moving from the x86's segmented memory architecture back in the day to a flat memory space. In other words, we've moved from a position of requiring SMP to get the kind of numbers needed to tackle big problems to not requiring SMP. It's completely valid to try and assess the impact of that. > SMP is still valuable for a ton of research, the DNA modeling > project comes to mind. I was talking to fellow Interlochen > "alumni", recently, that works at Pixar. All they do is use > clusters of SMP Linux (according to him) to do image and > animation generation. We could go on to the .mil's interest > in crypto and quantum simulation... Simply *because* processors > are becoming faster+relatively cheaper, means that scalable > SMP systems are becoming more desired. With the parallel > processing support of stuff like plan9 and friends, I think more > corporations and laboratories are going to begin investing > in distributed SMP clusters to process a range of data: from > market analysis, to gene analysis (that'd be great if we could > have an automated system to break down virii like SARS > fairly quickly with a cluster, don't you think...?) ....! All of that represents about 0% of the market. I'm not saying SMP is bad, or that support for it should be abandoned, but one should concentrate on where the biggest bang for the buck is. It's certainly a valid question whether that's in the SMP arena, and it would be intellectually dishonest to simply say, ``of course it is! Pixar uses it!'' As for breaking down SARS (which is way over-hyped to begin with; influenza kills many more people per day), why does one *need* SMP when networks of x86 machines connected by gigabit networks can be had cheaply? SMP may or may not be a better solution, but it's not a necessity, and one *must* evaluate the impact of it no longer being an absolute necessity for doing work on big problems. There's nothing wrong with that, or with asking questions. - Dan C.