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From FLOPS to IOPS: The New Bottlenecks of Scientific Computing
- PaulHoule 7y agoEvery HPC person I have talked to about it has downplayed the role of parallel I/O. Before the 360 mainframe, computers were designed either for commercial or scientific use. In the 1980s, the Japanese launched a "5th generation computer" project to develop parallelism for commercial applications (the 'A.I.' of the time was based on large-scale databases) and the U.S. countered with an HPC program centered around physics simulations. So the 1000x improvement in scalability of commercial clouds over HPC is a matter of specialization.