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Agree with you. I have a ~4k touchbar Macbook Pro and do HPC type of stuff all day... and I rarely consider doing anything more than a toy simulation or computa
by et2o 8y ago
Agree with you. I have a ~4k touchbar Macbook Pro and do HPC type of stuff all day... and I rarely consider doing anything more than a toy simulation or computational experiment on my laptop. When I previously used a Macbook Air, my toy PoC stuff ran pretty must just as well.
Anything else either quickly gets offloaded to one of my group's servers with 64-80 threads and 100s of GB of RAM or, if it's even bigger, to the local HPC cluster with 1000s of CPUs.
Even without access to existing resources: I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where, if I have a fixed budget of ~3-5k to do computational work, it'd be better for me to spend that on a top-end MBP than a two-piece solution of laptop+linux server.
- Fomite 8y agoA couple months ago, building projections for a rabies elimination program while sitting in a hotel bar in Zambia, I was pretty pleased I wasn't relying on a server. Edge case, sure, but shrug
- et2o 8y agoHaha fair enough. How's the rabies situation there? Are people still doing multicompartment SIR models? That kind of stuff is hard to parralelize.
- Fomite 8y agoIt's still a big deal, but getting better - my university's running a decently successful program in Kenya. And yeah, people still use compartmental models pretty heavily. A lot of my stuff is stochastic (it's about the beginning or end of epidemics, or in small populations) so that's nicely parallel.