🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <!14m#9l@lynx.unm.edu> john@aquarius.unm.edu (John Prentice) writes:
>In general, the hype in the MPP field is thick enough to cut with a
>knife.  Unfortunately, many large organizations are getting swept up by it and
>are basing purchasing decisions on it.  The result could well be that time on
>supercomputers capable of addressing the needs of the bulk of current users
>may be hard to come by in a few years.  Should be good news for the
>workstation manufacturers and people who are selling workstation networking
>software (along those lines, there was an interesting article in Monday or
>Tuesday's Wall Street Journal about people abondoning supercomputers in favor
>of networked workstations). 

Two years ago at the yearly Hackers Conference, there was some discussion
brought up about distributed programming after Hillis spoke about
genetic algorithms.  The general consensus appeared to be that programmers
did not care for centrally located resources whose time had to be scheduled or
where resource conflicts might take place.  While this view was a little
naive, I think it shows that people want to control their own resources.
[It's only naive because most of the people expressing the opinion were
not thinking about system balance and were not people aware of the state
of parallelism software.]  I believe it will go on pushed by things like PVM.

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
  Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
  {uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene
Second Favorite email message: Returned mail: Cannot send message for 3 days
A Ref: Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, vol. 1, G. Polya