[geeks] anyone know about this? 72-core, 48GB computer?

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 04:07:21PM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:

(answering several posts at once)

>Agreed.  I didn't mean to imply that Atom was somehow better than a MIPS64
>implementation just because I called it "beefier" - I only meant to imply
>that despite Atom being slimmed down from a lot of x86 out there, other
>architectures like MIPS64 (and ARM) can still be more efficient.

Well it turns out that the thing that killed the company was to outsource
fundrasing, and the company they hired choked. I had that happen to me
once at a first round funding stage, the person we contracted with's mother
got sick and he mentally shut down for a few months. 

We went on to find funding ourselves, which we were quite sucessful, but
blew the next step going from verbal agreements to money in the bank. This 
is were having someone who had experience would have helped.

As for what chip, I am still a fan of the x86 architechure because it is
so widely available. MIPS64 may be better, but in the end it may make no
difference. 

Another point to consider is that when I mentioned I knew someone who had
an alpha beowoulf cluster, he could not admit it in public or advertise for
employees with relevant experience. In either case it would have tipped the
competition off to something happening in that company, and they would guess
and build a competing product (which was actually a serice). 

If they guessed right, they would be competing in a field the company invested
a lot of money to be ahead of the competition, and if they guessed wrong,
they would be ahead of the company in an area they were not ready to compete in.

As for HPC programing, I know a "world class" expert in compiler design and
system optiumization who just got his Phd in computer science in that field.
We have lots of interesting discussions on the subject.

Unfortunately he was unable to find a job in his field due to geographical
limitations, and is making a low salary working for a company that does similar
work on a larger scale.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM