[Beowulf] commercial clusters

[Vincent Diepeveen]

Actually with respect to chess, it is not overblown,
there is 1 billion people on this planet that can play chess and the average 
IQ of a chessplayer
is significantly better than the world wide IQ (you can ask yourself whether 
this is caused by
chess, or whether it is the people who choose to play chess that are 
clever).

Nearly everyone who has an university degree or is high in government, can 
play chess.

Logically that this includes many persons with a lot of money.

But you have to *offer* them something that is attractive to buy. A good 
deal.

Not some electric heater that's gonna sink 3 kilometer into the ocean (and 
if you checkout
the new SSE4 instructions it's obvious that intel will let the itanic sink), 
soon after you buy it.

Vincent

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Lux" <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov>
To: "Geoff Jacobs" <gdjacobs at gmail.com>; "Vincent Diepeveen" 
<diep at xs4all.nl>
Cc: <beowulf at beowulf.org>; "Angel Dimitrov" <stormlaboratory at yahoo.com>; 
"Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 5:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] commercial clusters


> At 06:56 AM 9/29/2006, Geoff Jacobs wrote:
>>Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>> > If it was possible to build your own cluster in easy manner and then 
>> > run
>> > for
>> > example a chessprogram at it in a user friendly way,
>> > there would be 100k+ clusters right now of 64 cpu's and more.
>>
>>I think you maybe overestimate the number of chess players who can
>>challenge existing chess programs on their standard PC. I also think you
>>overestimate the number of chess players with ~$10k to blow on a cluster.
>
> Vincent's example of chess players may be a bit overblown, but his point 
> is very well taken.  There are an enormous number of people who could use 
> "big computation" if it were "easy to use" and "cheap enough".  $10K is a 
> significant price point.  Aside from traditional consumers of such things 
> (research labs, etc.) $10K is low enough that it is almost a consumer 
> item, albeit probably not mass market in the millions of sales context.
>
>
>
> Jim
>
>