From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3EB9A8EB.3070100@ameritech.net> From: northern snowfall User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) Gecko/20020518 Netscape6/6.2.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] design clairvoyance & the 9 way References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 19:46:35 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a331e8be-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > > >In retrospect, was this worth it? Sure, SMP machines >are becoming more prevalent, but when I can get a 2GHz on >my desktop the race with the back cpu server is pretty much >over. Ron probably appreciates it in his cluster computing, >but these days single processor systems are sufficiently cheap >and fast for most needs. > Isn't that kind of like what Bill Gates said... something about "640 kilobytes should be enough"... 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...?) ....! > > >