From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John
Hearns
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 7:38 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Beowulf] Manchester Guardian column on Cray and Windows HPC
As a Guardian reader, I have been reading the Thursday Technology
supplement for many years.
On the train this morning, I opened it to find Jack Schofield has an
article on Windows HPC and the
Cray deskside supercomputer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/09/computing.microsoft
Has Jack been reading the Beowulf list?
---
>From the article:
"For example, Faenov says Excel 2007 supports "transparent parallelism", so
that an HPC machine can speed up everyday workflows in financial institutions
where they have spreadsheets that take hours or even days to run. (Crazy, I
know.)"
No doubt, those models were used to do interesting things like calculate
expected risk of default for the multiple tranches in various securitized debt
obligations. I'm not sure that, philosopically, more speed is good in this
area. It's one thing for a mathematical proof to be so big only a computer can
do it (e.g. 4color map theorem), or when you want to run numerical models of
weather or fluid dynamics. At least in those areas, there's a fair amount of
work that goes into validation of the underlying numerics.
Excel, on the other hand, is probably not the best tool in the world for hard
core numerical analysis (what with *interesting* phenomena like the famous
850*77.1= 100000 bug, ... Yes it was fixed, but it's not like there's some
rigorous verification of Excel's computations that's available for
inspection)http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/2007/Excel2007/Excel2007Bug.pdf
has an explanation
And, as it happens this particular HPC application space (long running
spreadsheet calcs) does exist. Many years ago, my sister had a job at a bank
where part of the task was running Lotus 1-2-3 worksheets on a PC that took
hours to recalc on a PC/AT. I actually contemplated designing and building an
ECL IBM PC emulator for this market, but then Intel came out with the 386,
etc.. Much better system solution to solve it in silicon.
Jim
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