[mdlug] Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone by Adapteva — Kickstarter

[David Lane]

I work a t a college and there are about 300,000 accounts twice a year we have to "evaluate" the accounts. it takes 2 days to run. 

There are a lot of reasons that system's the performance ... SUCKS. (Excuse me, I'll be nice) But even if the programming and resources were good or better something so massive would be a candidate for such an application. 

With a linear problem it is simple but that is done at the application level. In the large number of accounts the solution would be sending chunks to worker bee applications then the results are sent back to the controller.  

Since many of us have multi core pc's, that is a good place to start. 

Now what problem is out there that can be tackled? What problem that uses a lot of resources that that they would benefit from by making it process faster? 

Because when I step forward and offer a solution to the 2 day process of just 300,000 accounts I'm sent back to my cubicle.




________________________________
 From: Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org>
To: mdlug at mdlug.org 
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2012 9:12 AM
Subject: Re: [mdlug] Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone by Adapteva — Kickstarter
 
On Wed, 2012-10-10 at 06:04 -0700, David Lane wrote:
> I have looked into high performance computing the question is:
> What application do you have that needs supercomputing?

+1 This is 'cool', but 99.44% of users need a supercomputer as badly as
they need a giant pink inflatable elephant.

But that other 0.56% need one yesterday.

A supercomputer is only useful for problems that can be decomposed in
certain ways [or is worth figuring out how to decompose].  Otherwise an
old-fashioned just-faster-computer is better.

> Has everyone seen this yet?
> This project isn't fully funded yet, but would be an awesome thing to demo at a meeting if/when it delivers.
> The planned OS is Ubuntu 12.10, so it is on-topic.
> I want my own mini supercomputer.
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone


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