Owen, HPC system requirements are pretty much 100% application-dependent. Large scale ABM simulations, like EpiSims require clusters with fast interconnects, as Marcus indicated. Other HPC apps have different requirements. E-Commerce needs large memory + lots of CPU horsepower for database transaction processing, but not necessarily low-latency MPP interconnect.
Other apps might have low-bandwith, high-latency behaviors that cloud-style HPC could satisfy. BTW, I got a case of the Willies looking at the NMCAC page. The have a pretty capable cluster, but the organization looks like it was patterned after the worst of the bureaucracies that LANL and the State of New Mexico have demonstrated. Look at http://newmexicosupercomputer.com/team.html for an example of what I mean. --Doug -- Doug Roberts [email protected] [email protected] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jan 25, 2010, at 12:10 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: > >> Google will eventually beat all these efforts because they are thinking >>> plumbing/networking with scalable data stores (NoSql). >>> >> Hmm, I think their application toolkits will get good at use cases where >> there are medium and high latencies to deal with along with medium >> individual bandwidths, e.g. JavaScript within a web browser and delays from >> communication over the internet. And they'll get better and better at >> managing millions of such workloads. That's completely different from high >> performance computing and scientific workloads. >> > > Good point, the architecture for large scale computing is likely differ > between application: scientific/engineering, visualization, large graph > computations, simulations and so on. > > Which of us have an idea of specific "super computing" architectures? What > would your "three wishes" be for such a system? > > Doug: I know your work with clusters would qualify. If you had a mega buck > or two, how'd you spend it? > > -- Owen > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
