On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 11:17:30AM -0500, Lawrence Stewart wrote: > In principle this might work, if you get the problem statement right, > and you can design and build the machine before the general purpose > machines catch up, and you don't make any mistakes, and after it is > built you can keep designing new ones. In practice it always seems to > take longer than you expected and cost more, and maybe that 7 bit ALU > really has to be changed to an 8 bit ALU to keep the precision up.
I've seen David talk about this machine a couple of time, and he addressed this issue: he realizes it's risky, and he was hoping to advance the state of the art by 5 years over a commodity cluster. While I was at D. E. Shaw (1996), the most effective headhunter for the systems department was the guy who cold-called sysadmins at good computer science departments. My office-mate was formally a sysadmin at Princeton. He still lived there, too; rgb might want to keep mass transit in mind when he's dissing living near NYC. For the strategies, they mostly hired folks who'd just finished degrees in the hard sciences. -- greg _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
