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> And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more Well, that is because we do have very high performance PCs these days. Somewhere on Wikipe
by krylon 11y ago
> And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more
Well, that is because we do have very high performance PCs these days. Somewhere on Wikipedia, there is a quote by somebody (I forget who...), that a supercomputer is a device for turning a CPU-bound problem into an IO-bound problem. By that definition, even modest PCs these days are supercomputers for the majority of programs ordinary people run on them.
- BuildTheRobots 11y agoThe quote is from Ken Batcher (- I liked it enough I went digging). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Batcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Batcher
- krylon 11y agoThanks!
- hga 11y agoa supercomputer is a device for turning a CPU-bound problem into an IO-bound problem Heh. I remember a tale from the days of the early generation Crays, where they were showing one off to an IBM guy, who said, yeah, impressive, but what about I/O? So a Cray guy ran something and got all the tapes to moving. The IBM guy was unimpressed until they pointed out they were writing data to all of them. At least in those days the problem was understood, don't know about current supercomputers, but as I understand it one of the things that makes them expensive is their board to board interconnects, so I doubt they neglect I/O at the same time.