Sorry about not addressing this. (and I appreciate your gentle prod)
The Xgrid would likely work well on these problems. They are, after all, nearly trivial to parallelize because of clean communication patterns. Consider an alternative problem of solving n-body gravitational dynamics for n > 10^6 bodies. Here there is nearly universal communication. As another example, last week I heard from some Sun engineers that one of their HPC systems had to satisfy a requirement for checkpointing large numerical computations in which a large number of computational nodes were required to dump 10's of TB of checkpoint data to disk in less than 10 seconds. Finally, many of these HPC systems are designed to fit the entire working set into memory so that high numerical computational throughput can be maintained. In this regime, communications have to work on memory time-scales rather than disk time-scales. None of these three example problems are very suitable for Hadoop. The sample problems you gave are a different matter. On 12/5/07 2:04 AM, "Bob Futrelle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > why an Xgrid cluster with its attendant.management system > would or would not be equally good for these problems
