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If you don't need a high-speed interconnect, you don't need HPC. That's not to say that MPI per se must always be involved, but if for instance the 10gbit conn
by stonogo 10y ago
If you don't need a high-speed interconnect, you don't need HPC. That's not to say that MPI per se must always be involved, but if for instance the 10gbit connection on Amazon's half-baked "HPC" offering is sufficient, then you definitely don't need a supercomputer.
There is a ton of important scientific work waiting for core hours that really shouldn't be. A loosely-connected grid of laptops would serve a lot of projects very well. On the other hand, there is a large body of work that does require a classical supercomputer, so it doesn't really do anyone any good to accuse MPI of being a sales gimmick.
- dekhn 10y agoThere is plenty of HPC that does not need interconnect. It's false, categorically, to say that HPC requires interconnect of any kind. An isolated, off-net computer - even a desktop PC- stuffed to the gills with GPUs can do HPC. On the other hand, machines connected with 10gbit might do HPC, but you'll have trouble getting codes to scale in a way that is "high performance", relative to what you can get out of threading on a single machine, or a small number of GPUs. Very little work truly requires classic supercomputers or MPI- there are very few codes where an important engineering problem must be run on a system with low latency, high bandwidth.