[rescue] Small servers (was Re: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100)

[Shannon Hendrix]

On May 5, 2008, at 16:00 , Robert Darlington wrote:

> And absolutely none of that applies to high performance computing.
> Try running object oriented code where time counts!  I guess you could
> always throw more computing power at a problem, but the problems I've
> worked on take months to solve with computers that cost half a billion
> dollars.  Going OO would increase the time to solution many times
> over.  Fortran 77 for life, pointers be damned.

One of the best performance charts I have ever seen is in "Programming  
Pearls".

They show a TRS-80 and a DEC Alpha doing the same job, but the TRS-80  
code is better written.

The DEC is hundreds of times faster... until the problem size  
increases to a point at which the DEC would take 400 years to do what  
the TRS-80 does in fifteen minutes.

Excellent example of how little raw power means if you use it wrong,  
and exactly why throwing horsepower or misguided ideology at a problem  
is stupid.

Programmers do *NOT* always cost more than computers.

-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."