[Beowulf] Re: Rackable / SGI

[John Hearns]

2009/4/5 Jason Riedy <jason at acm.org>:
> I'm more shocked that no one has written up using cfengine for
> managing laptops.  It seems a perfect model.  With the more open
> development model, perhaps it'll come back.  But its competitors
> are more "web 2.0 cool."

Indeed. We are all just lumbering dinosaurs here. We endlessly discuss
benchmarking, performance, use of high-grade compilers, file systems
which go like stink and scale like crazy, interconnects which let us
use thousands of cores and tbytes of memory on the same problem at
once.

Do we not notice the little birds running about our feet who are
twittering(*) about elastic cloud computing to the managers, and how
all computing will be done via web services on the Cloud, and how
their businesses should all be virtualised to the point of not having
these crusty olf Frotran (Fortran! Ha!) types and their emergency
stacks of punch cards.


(*) pun intended. For which I should be shot at dawn.