[Beowulf] Intro question

[Joe Landman]

Dan.Kidger at quadrics.com wrote:
> If I had that much money, I too would try and buy a Nobel Prize in preference to a yacht.
> 
> D.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Lawrence Stewart
> Sent: 05 December 2008 16:18
> To: Robert G. Brown
> Cc: Beowulf Mailing List; Lux, James P
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Intro question
> 
> I've been to a couple of DE Shaw talks and I always come away puzzled.
> 
> It's tempting to conclude that they are just smarter than I am, but
> maybe they are just wrong.
> 
> My understanding is they are building a special purpose molecular
> dynamics machine because it will be far faster than a general purpose
> machine programmed to do MD.
> 
> In principle this might work, if you get the problem statement right,
> and you can design and build the machine before the general purpose
> machines catch up, and you don't make any mistakes, and after it is
> built you can keep designing new ones.  In practice it always seems to
> take longer than you expected and cost more, and maybe that 7 bit ALU
> really has to be changed to an 8 bit ALU to keep the precision up.

The MDGrape guys might have a thing or three to say.  They have been 
demonstrating some pretty awesome performance for years.


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
        http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax  : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615