[Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Joe Landman]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> It was PVM that enabled true message passing parallel code to be written
>> that made a pile of machines (be they Alphas, simple PCs, Sun
> 
> I'm not disagreeing, but wonder why PVM is basically extinct now.
> that is, why was MPI considered an improvement/replacement?

Marketing by the MPI groups?  More to the point, it looked like MPI had 
significant backing.  I don't know if it was "better" in a technical 
sense (though some folks do argue strongly about MPI being "better").

> 
>> MS knifed IBM over OS/2 (which was a decently designed OS that might
>> have given Unix a real run for its money) and hence lost out on all the
> 
> I worked on OS/2, and it was no peach on the inside, so to speak ;)



It was nice in that I could run huge (at the time) jobs on my 16 MB ram 
PC.  I remember running on one of those "sparc" units and this PC, and 
the PC was about the same speed (molecular dynamics).  The brand new 
R3000 shiny SGI Indigos with a whopping 192 MB of ram and a huge 1 GB 
disk, these were great to work with.  Much faster.  Could do 100 time 
steps of MD in a week.

FWIW, I can do about 1 time step in less than 20 seconds on my laptop 
(AMD Athlon 64 2GHz chip)...

> it's hard to speculate about what-ifs on a system which had barely
> shaken off its initial hw target (12 MHz 286!) by the time it was dropped.

heh... OS2 was quite a bit better than win31.  Somewhat better/more 
stable than w95/w98.  It just never caught on in any meaningful sense. 
And about the time it tried to pick up momentum, Linux got to be 
installable/useful.  I remember my first laptop (self purchased) had a 
75 MHz pentium processor, a 2 GB disk, and I ran windows, OS2 and Linux 
(RH in the pre-5 days) on there.  Pretty soon after that, OS2 fell off.



-- 

Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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