http://scalability.org/?p=152 not so random musings and mutterings about high performance computing Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:40:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 http://scalability.org/?p=152&cpage=1#comment-586 Supercomputing 2006 - A vicarious look at business|bytes|genes|molecules Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:21:56 +0000 http://scalability.org/?p=152#comment-586 [...] Power to the people. In one of Joe’s posts, he talks about “making more power open to wider groups of people”. I cannot agree more. We need to be in a situation where the average person who wants a specific task done should not be hardware limited (within reason). This includes the scientist who wants to visualize complex scientific data as well as the researcher who wants to run massive MD simulations. I don’t think everyone looks at the technical specifications of the hardware these days. People look at form factors, ease of use, etc. Perhaps the user doesn’t care where the computation is happening as long as they can run it and look at the results. All these needs point to two areas that I have actually criticized in the past, accelerators and grid computing. I believe that at this point in time both have serious issues with commercialization and acceptance, or perhaps users aren’t quite pushing their current systems in a way that makes them wish they needed these technologies. I also suspect that there is a level of awareness, or lack thereof, that plays a part in adoption as well. [...] [...] Power to the people. In one of Joe’s posts, he talks about “making more power open to wider groups of people”. I cannot agree more. We need to be in a situation where the average person who wants a specific task done should not be hardware limited (within reason). This includes the scientist who wants to visualize complex scientific data as well as the researcher who wants to run massive MD simulations. I don’t think everyone looks at the technical specifications of the hardware these days. People look at form factors, ease of use, etc. Perhaps the user doesn’t care where the computation is happening as long as they can run it and look at the results. All these needs point to two areas that I have actually criticized in the past, accelerators and grid computing. I believe that at this point in time both have serious issues with commercialization and acceptance, or perhaps users aren’t quite pushing their current systems in a way that makes them wish they needed these technologies. I also suspect that there is a level of awareness, or lack thereof, that plays a part in adoption as well. [...]

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