21–30 of 125 posts
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=p0h9vAb1m7IC&pg=PA365#v=on...
Yes, "high performance computing" is dying. There's no commercial market for it. Check the list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.[1] The top 10 are all Government operations. In the top 25, there are a few oil companies, mostly running big arrays of Intel Xeons. CPU clock speeds maxed out between 3-4GHz a decade ago. Nobody develops special supercomputing CPUs any more. The market is tiny. Old supercomputer…
CPUs any more CPUs, err, schmee-PUs. It's all about the interconnect and people can and do make special interconnects.
Yes, "high performance computing" is dying. There's no commercial market for it. Check the list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.[1] The top 10 are all Government operations. In the top 25, there are a few oil companies, mostly running big arrays of Intel Xeons. CPU clock speeds maxed out between 3-4GHz a decade ago. Nobody develops special supercomputing CPUs any more. The market is tiny. Old supercomputer…
Did you RTFA? It's about MPI: "MPI is a language-independent communications protocol used to program parallel computers." Runs fine on commodity clusters.
Kind of.... For simple, low communication jobs this is true. But when you start trying to find the eigenvectors of a large sparse matrix, communication becomes your bottleneck, at which point MPI on commodity clusters (those without a really fancy interconnect) "works", but not fast enough to be useful.
The article briefly mentions Erlang with its focus on message passing, and the focus on being fault tolerant should be another benefit. I could find a few mentions of Erlang used for simulations, such as here[1], but I am curious whether there is much actual usage in scientific computing, or whether there are some problems in practice. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=p0h9vAb1m7IC&pg=PA365#v=on...
The article briefly mentions Erlang with its focus on message passing, and the focus on being fault tolerant should be another benefit. I could find a few mentions of Erlang used for simulations, such as here[1], but I am curious whether there is much actual usage in scientific computing, or whether there are some problems in practice. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=p0h9vAb1m7IC&pg=PA365#v=on...
The Fortran Standards Committee is attempting to make HPC easier through the use of coarrays, which are essentially massive abstractions over MPI. I really wish people would give Fortran a second chance. It has come a long way from the ancient, all-caps days.
I spent a few months learning (modern) Fortran a year or two ago. My chief obstacle was the difficulty involved in finding modern tutorials. I don't want to have to read tutorials written in 1994 whose focus is getting people used to F77 up to speed. I've yet to find a tutorial that approached teaching F08 as if it was a new language, which is what I feel is needed. Even in F08 there's a lot of backwards-compatibilit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you RTFA? It's about MPI: "MPI is a language-independent communications protocol used to program parallel computers." Runs fine on commodity clusters.
>Runs fine on commodity clusters. Kind of.... For simple, low communication jobs this is true. But when you start trying to find the eigenvectors of a large sparse matrix, communication becomes your bottleneck, at which point MPI on commodity clusters (those without a really fancy interconnect) "works", but not fast enough to be useful.
I was a Smalltalk coder. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. It has always been clear to me that Smalltalk is far superior to Java.
I left the company after a little while, to do C++ graphics. I later heard that my former employer rewrote their Smalltalk application in Java.
Now no one uses Smalltalk anymore. While Objective-C is based on Smalltalk, Smalltalk was far easier to use, however lots of people use Objective-C. No one uses Smalltalk.
How could it have been different? My friend Kurt Thames once said that "Smalltalk is the way object-oriented programming SHOULD be done." I have always agreed with that.
But when new methods (!) of OOP arose, all the Smalltalk crowd did was gripe about how Smalltalk was far better than Java or Objective-C.
The Fortran Standards Committee is attempting to make HPC easier through the use of coarrays, which are essentially massive abstractions over MPI. I really wish people would give Fortran a second chance. It has come a long way from the ancient, all-caps days.
I LIKE PROGRAMMING IN ALL-CAPS. IT MAKES EVERYTHING I WRITE LOOK OFFICIAL, NO-NONSENSE AND GENERALLY HARD-CORE. INSTEAD OF HAVING A CONVERSATION WITH THE COMPILER I INSTEAD SHOUT!!! COMMANDS AT IT.
This is how the modern FORTRAN Hello world looks like...
program hello
print *, "Hello World!"
end program helloMPI is Message Passing Interface, for those who don't know. Author never explicitly says what MPI stands for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface