[Beowulf] Opinions of Hyper-threading?

[Peter St. John]

Jim,
Just re:

"If one wanted to design revolutionary distributed/parallel computing
algorithms, one could probably work with floppy disks and sneakernet. If it
works there, it will certainly work on any faster mechanism.
See.. true computer science doesn't need a 1000 processor cluster."

I agree of course, I grew up on paper and pencil, but there's one proviso:
the process of trial and error is just murder with floppies and sneakernet.
If trial and error is part of your development process, then a thousand
processor cluster (whatever powerful hardware) is so convenient as to be
qualitatively necessary. It still astounds me that Holland came up with
Genetic Algorithms in the sixties, though; so you're right it's possible to
do without.

Peter
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