[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old

[Dave Fischer]

jdboyd at jdboyd.net writes:

>Did a XIO FDDI card even exist?

I've seen reference to them, but I have no idea how rare they are.

>> (Haven't actually tried very hard to solve this problem, and the 
>> Origin-2000 is a recent aquisition.)

>I've been wondering, how do you make effective use of all the CPUs in
>the "CM-4000"?

I do animation and video. Splitting up the processing into 100 frames
per job or so (depending on the project) I can easily keep a large
cluster busy. There's no processor-to-processor communication going
on at all. I usually have a large amount (gigs) of read-only data
that all processes need, and mmap() that, so 14 processes run very
well on an E4000, sharing one copy of the data.

Some jobs get threaded instead, but I avoid that when possible.

The CM-4000 did get scaled back though, after I saw my electric bill
one month after running two nodes for a couple of days straight...
I've decided that two maxed E4000's is sufficient for now. 

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org ------