4 ms·
Right out of school (early 2000s), I did network modelling consulting. My main client bought a Sunfire V1280 box (12 CPUs, and the server room guys hated me fo
by KMag 6y ago
Right out of school (early 2000s), I did network modelling consulting. My main client bought a Sunfire V1280 box (12 CPUs, and the server room guys hated me for the amount of power it drew/heat it put out) to run network simulations. As I remember, the main two advantages SPARC and POWER systems being sold at that time over x86 were (1) reliability and (2) memory / I/O bandwidth.
I tried to look up who first said something along the lines of "A supercomuter is a tool for turning a compute-bound problem into an I/O-bound problem" and all I could find was an ArsTechnica article referencing it as an old joke. I thought it was an old joke by someone of the stature of Cray or Amdahl, but maybe that's apocryphal.
In any case, our network simulations attempted to perform a min-cut (using number of packets as the cost metric) to partition simulation nodes among threads, run one thread per core, and pin a thread to each core. With a network simulation, though, as you can imagine, the problem was usually bound by memory bandwidth.
Also, the client was a defense contractor, and the 400k+ USD box was an artefact of "use it or lose it" budgeting. If they didn't spend all of their budget by December 31st, the group's budget would be reduced the following year. In their case, the high cost of the box was a feature.
- random5634 6y agoAhh - govt budgeting - I've been there. What is a bit funny is after fighting for $1,000 during the year, some budget manager calls in a panic near year end - how fast can you spend $150K - on anything you want. Turns out - as Amazon has noticed with cheap stuff, whoever has stuff in stock and can ship quick gets the deal - price totally irrelevant. There was a while during the stimulus spending where politicians were I guess getting heat for not spending stimulus money fast enough, so the pressure to spend got pushed down big time. Every layer was trying to push spending out as fast as they could. For those not familiar with this area and wondering why a higher level agency would push spending rather than trying to save money? A lot of govt budgets between appropriation and final vendors are based on % of allocated spending. So a state agency will take 10%, a local agency will take 10%, and then it ends up in the hands of whoever does the work. Everyone above has built their budgets on all the money being spent. They've staffed for that. So if you show up and spend 50% of your allocation, now they only get 50% of their 10% and can be in a real jam, particularly if they have already spent their entire expected amount or committed to spend it (staff have been hired). It can be hard to re-budget amounts between vendors / recipients so the pressure on whoever didn't spend all their money can be intense, because it's messing up a whole chain of other budgets.
- PeterStuer 6y agoIt is not a just the public sector. "Use it or lose it" budgets are endemic in large enterprises as anyone who has contracts with them can confirm.