Quote:
|
Originally Posted by unregistered
lol
I was chatting with a CFD guy and he asked what I would run it on, and when I told him of my big dual Athlon setup he could not stop laughing
bah
|
Hmmm, seems a bit snobbish. Not even 10 years ago the place I worked at was hiring out one of the large 8-way Digital boxes that had 8 x 333MHz Alpha CPUs racked up with 8GB of memory, and that's exactly the kind of computational work that the system was used for. At the time, the system was one of the most powerful computers in the country.
A dual-Opteron with 4GB of ram would be perfectly capable of handling such problems, it's just that some modern engineers who laugh have forgotten where their roots were and the sorts of problems that were solved every-day on much weaker systems than are in use today.
For me as a software engineer, it's not my job to laugh at people, but to solve the problem. Despite the memory and computing shortfall next to a large computational cluster, the very nature of the problem is divide and conquer, except here you'd just be dividing amongst 2CPU's and 4GB of memory, instead of 128CPU's and 1TB of (distributed) memory. The computational problem is the same, it just takes longer, (or you just reduce the resolution).
Sorry Bill. Such attitudes cut at the core of my work ethos.