[Beowulf] massive parallel processing application required

[Mark Hahn]

> Not true.  Distributed computing is more and more mainstream.  I think too

oh, one other snide comment about grid: I suspect the grid-fad could not 
have happened without the fraud perpetrated by worldcom and others during
the internet bubble.  in those days, it was popular to claim that the network
was becoming truely ubiquitous and incomprehensibly fast.  for instance:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/grid/library/gr-heritage/#N100A6

I don't know about you, but in the 6 years since then, my home net 
connection has stayed the same speed, possibly a bit more expensive.
desktop/LANs are still mostly at 100bT, with 1000bT in limited use.
I do notice that grabbing large files off the net (ftp, RPMs, etc)
often runs at O(MBps) which is about a 10x improvement over the past 
10-15 years.  so the doubling time turns out to be more like 3 years
rather than 9 months.  in-cluster networking has improved somewhat 
faster, but not dramatically so.