[geeks] Massively parallel... cheap?

[Joshua D Boyd]

Well, it would really help if you were more specific.  Especially by saying
exactly what you want to do.

One question is can this work be represented as solving several series of 
linear equations?  Can vector math help at all?  Do you need register 
rotations?

Also, you are going to need to choose a homogenious solution unless you want 
to port your code to each platform and write your own scheduling system, or
explore the cutting edge ground of using Java or Python.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd

On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 08:43:33PM -0800, David Passmore wrote:
> I am in need of some recommendations. I have a project in mind that will
> require a machine (or cluster) with some pretty beefy capabilities:
> 
> * 64+ processors (the more, the better!)
> * Several gigabytes of memory -- this is basically a big disk cache
> * ability to address 1TB+ of disk
> 
> The computation this system will be performing is most likely going to be
> simple integer math and comparisons-- *maybe* floating point but I doubt it.
> The working data set will be *huge*, several gigabytes in size, with
> somewhere between 10000 and 100000+ data points being computed at any given
> 'time'. Think about a talk similar to simulating the movement of a million
> stars and that's pretty much what I'm up against, which is why it has to
> execute as many operations in parallel as possible. If someone has something
> brilliant to say here, I'd sure love to hear it.
> 
> The real catch: this has to run in my basement, or in colo, so the Cray on
> eBay is out of the question. ;) What can folks suggest in terms of a system
> or cluster to run this kind of task on?