Hardware trends WAS Re: [geeks] For Dave M - Fscking Suits

[Rick McMullen]

On Saturday 09 March 2002 07:03 am, you wrote:
> On March 7, Rick McMullen wrote:
> > Oh, and we upgraded to 24 of the 32 processor Wildfire Clusters
> > just in time for the Q to commit Alpha-cide.  Great visionaries in
> > our IT department.
>
>   Wow, better get rid of 'em quick.  They'll stop processing data any
> minute now.
>

Sorry, my remark was somewhat lacking in context.  The justification 
given for dropping the SGI workstations was that the IT department was 
trying to foresee the future direction of computing and anticipate it.  
That was how we were sold the SGI>>Wintel "progression".  The fact that 
these same nitwits then wrongly guessed the future of the big iron was 
the irony I was trying to imply.

The Wildfires are pretty amazing.  When I got here 2 years ago, the 
model I was running took about 50 minutes on the Cray C90 to run to 
completion.  The same model (no changes required to the input deck, 
differently compiled executable) runs in about 5 minutes as a 
four-processor job.

The real bitch for us is mass storage.  We are currently generating 
about a Terabyte a year and can't seem to catch up with it.  There is a 
very real danger of losing some of our archived data from the early 
years simply due to not being able to read the media.

-- 
Rick McMullen