On Jul 6, 2009, at 9:59 PM, tortoise wrote:
> For high end machines > clearly IBM and AMD excel. These are the cpus preferred by scientists > and engineers -- they are not the same as the consumer versions > admittedly but those benefit from this research. The "go to" machine for upper-upper-end scientific work, particularly nuclear bomb simulation, is a PPC with 131,072 cores. "Clusters" of Intel architecture machines are now affordable for electrical and mechanical engineering consultants, where perhaps 64 Intel PCs may be clustered, often using Lawrence Livermore National Labs' clustering software. Of course, these many to massively paralleled configurations are possible only with good "split and join" additions to compilers and other tools. In one "split and join" test of a significant note, 64 specialized database processors ... made by a certain database software manufacturer up the Peninsula ... were arrayed and accessed a certain database of financial data. A competitive system was configured using the very same data, but using a single Amdahl S/390 processor, and IBM's DB, not that other database software. The single Amdahl database processor beat the 64-way database processor in every test case. Naturally, that 64-way processor later showed up at Weird Stuff Warehouse, where it was sold for scrap value. Actually, it was only "crap value" which that system ever possessed. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
