[Beowulf] Blue Collar Computing

[Finch, Ralph]

I gotta say I didn't find the signal-to-noise ratio all that high in the
Blue Collar Computing article cited below.  And statements like this
seem downright misleading:

'National labs that do large-scale "heroic computing" -- the Departments
of Energy and Defense (DOE and DoD) and the National Science Foundation
(NSF) -- will continue to concentrate on monumental, "grand challenge"
problems.'

Really?  But, for instance, LBNL's Chombo software
(http://seesar.lbl.gov/anag/chombo/index.html) doesn't seem targeted to
only grand challenge problems:

'Chombo provides a distributed infrastructure for parallel calculations
over block-structured, adaptively refined grids. Chombo's design is
uniquely flexible and accessible. Any collaborator will be able to
develop parallel applications to solve the partial differential
equations in which she is interested with far shorter development times
than would be possible without the infrastructure. Very careful design
and documentation allows said collaborator to enter the software at many
levels. She will be able to use Chombo to investigate deep technical
issues of adaptive mesh refinement algorithms or to simply adapt the
example applications to solve different scientific problems.'

We hope to use Chombo in a new water resources modeling we're
developing, hardly a grand challenge application, yet possible only with
the advanced work already done by a National Lab.

Ralph Finch, P.E.
Dept. of Water Resources
Bay-Delta Office, Room 215-13
Sacramento, CA  95814
916-653-7552
rfinch at water.ca.gov
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org 
> [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Douglas Eadline
> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:12 AM
> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: [Beowulf] Blue Collar Computing
> 
> 
> While we are talking about the "big issues", I would like
> to invite those who have not read it before, to read Stan Ahalt and
> Kathryn Kelly's article on Blue Collar Computing. It quite an 
> interesting
> take on HPC in industry. You find it on the font page:
> 
>   http://www.clustermonkey.net
> 
> Or go directly to the story,
> 
>   http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/99/33/
> 
> It brings up some important points, some of which hit on the 
> educational
> issues mentioned already.
> 
> There is also plenty of other interesting things to check 
> out on the
> Monkey as well:
> 
>  A continuing MPI tutorial by Jeff Squyres
>  A Benchmark for Parallel File Systems by Jeff Layton
>  and more...
> 
> --
> Doug
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