3 ms·

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray http:

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray)

tyvkiuiyi 17y ago
If you wanted to find a needle in a stack of chicken feed would you use 1024 chickens or two oxen?
wmf 17y ago
<rant>These Seymour Cray quotes have been obsoleted by changes in technology, and trotting them out yet again just displays ignorance of those changes.</rant> There are no "strong oxen" in today's world; both supercomputers and EC2 are clusters using more or less the same processors.
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  > There are no "strong oxen" in today's world Some problems demand shared-memory architectures. The fact that those who work on such problems lack the funding to support a large market in shared-memory machines does not negate the problems' existence.
  - wmf 17y ago
    I assume that Cray was talking about a uniprocessor, not SMP. Besides, it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster against EC2's shared-nothing cluster.
    - asciilifeform 17y ago
      > it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster... I merely object to the modern redefinition of the word "supercomputer" to mean a warehouse full of cheap PCs. There once were actual supercomputers.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
    - sp332 17y ago
      Cray didn't make uniprocessors. The reason his supercomputers were faster (and why Cray Computer Corporation is still a darn good supercomputer company) were advances in moving data among lots of processors.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      He wasn't but that's beside the point. There is a -limited- market for 'real' supercomputers, and with that I mean computers that have been geared towards a special class of problems. They too exist in SMP versions, but it would be a serious mistake to think of the individual machines in those arrays as comparable to a machine in a run-of-the-mill beowulf arrangement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-9 The reason these machines still have a right to an existence is because not all problems are solvable in a massively parallel fashion. Some parallelization may be possible, but the speed up from such rearranging of the problem has an upper limit. That's where these machines come in to their own.
- cabacon 17y ago
  Actually, there are still strong oxen. Arguably, there are fewer people who need them, but they're out there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(computer)#Cray_Inc.:_2000_to_present http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(computer)#Cray_Inc.:_20..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters, and others on 1+ petaflop front are pretty exotic beasts, and run codes that require all 100k+ processors to work in tandem across their speedy interconnects.

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray)

tyvkiuiyi 17y ago

If you wanted to find a needle in a stack of chicken feed would you use 1024 chickens or two oxen?

wmf 17y ago

<rant>These Seymour Cray quotes have been obsoleted by changes in technology, and trotting them out yet again just displays ignorance of those changes.</rant> There are no "strong oxen" in today's world; both supercomputers and EC2 are clusters using more or less the same processors.

asciilifeform 17y ago
> There are no "strong oxen" in today's world Some problems demand shared-memory architectures. The fact that those who work on such problems lack the funding to support a large market in shared-memory machines does not negate the problems' existence.
- wmf 17y ago
  I assume that Cray was talking about a uniprocessor, not SMP. Besides, it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster against EC2's shared-nothing cluster.
  - asciilifeform 17y ago
    > it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster... I merely object to the modern redefinition of the word "supercomputer" to mean a warehouse full of cheap PCs. There once were actual supercomputers.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
  - sp332 17y ago
    Cray didn't make uniprocessors. The reason his supercomputers were faster (and why Cray Computer Corporation is still a darn good supercomputer company) were advances in moving data among lots of processors.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    He wasn't but that's beside the point. There is a -limited- market for 'real' supercomputers, and with that I mean computers that have been geared towards a special class of problems. They too exist in SMP versions, but it would be a serious mistake to think of the individual machines in those arrays as comparable to a machine in a run-of-the-mill beowulf arrangement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-9 The reason these machines still have a right to an existence is because not all problems are solvable in a massively parallel fashion. Some parallelization may be possible, but the speed up from such rearranging of the problem has an upper limit. That's where these machines come in to their own.
cabacon 17y ago
Actually, there are still strong oxen. Arguably, there are fewer people who need them, but they're out there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(computer)#Cray_Inc.:_2000_to_present http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(computer)#Cray_Inc.:_20..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters, and others on 1+ petaflop front are pretty exotic beasts, and run codes that require all 100k+ processors to work in tandem across their speedy interconnects.