3 ms·
interesting, do you feel that the lack of idle periods was because it was being used for tasks that truly demanded and could not be performed without that compu
by wepple 10y ago
interesting, do you feel that the lack of idle periods was because it was being used for tasks that truly demanded and could not be performed without that compute power?
Or was it a combination of that with "well its there, and we want to do this thing that would happen quicker on the big machine" - IE not necessarily enabling new research, just adding a nice speedup to existing work?
- tanderson92 10y agoYou don't generally build a large supercomputer to simply run a task faster than on a smaller cluster. The goal is to enable more realistic simulations by solving problems using a greater number of unknowns, increasing the fidelity of output. So no, these machines are often used for problems which really do utilize the large-scale nature of the computers.
- davidmr 10y agoI agree with tanderson92. Whether the actual science from all the simulations is "worthwhile" is for people much smarter than me, but to get time on a "leadership" class machine, you have to prove in your application that a) it will run properly on the hardware; and b) that it's science you wouldn't get done on smaller machines. So lots of the "big data" type problems with lots of uncoordinated jobs aren't going to take advantage of the primary component of these big computers, the node interconnect. The computers really shine with big fluid dynamics simulations where there's lots of chatter between different components of the simulation to communicate boundary conditions and the like.