3 ms·
At our university, at least when I studied there some 15 years ago, the whole cluster was occupied doing weather predictions each and every night. No point in
by magicalhippo 3y ago
At our university, at least when I studied there some 15 years ago, the whole cluster was occupied doing weather predictions each and every night.
No point in staying up waiting for a job, it'd get rescheduled in the early morning at best.
It wasn't the largest cluster around, IIRC 768 quad-core nodes, but I'm sure the meteorological department would find a way to utilize any extra capacity, so still requiring the whole thing all night.
- moomin 3y agoFeels like this might be an invariant in computer science. I once worked on an IBM/360. The majority of the compute was taken up by a single person who did weather simulation. An IBM/360 has laughably less compute than your phone.
- phinnaeus 3y agoIt might still have produced a better weather prediction than my phone, though /s
- nicklecompte 3y ago"Computational fluid dynamics is hard" seems like a true bona fide CS invariant.
- Keyframe 3y agoENIAC ran weather as well. It's a kind of numerical simulation that will always be in need of compute cycles. We'll need more of it as we go deeper into climate change.