Check B2 of today's (December 20, 1999) SF Chronicle for an article
about supercomputing application development at Lawrence Livermore
Labratory. I went to a talk a couple weeks ago given by Bill Saphir
wcs@nersc.gov at Sac State regarding the use of Linux in Super computing
applications. Interesting thing is that you can effectively build a
small cluster up to about fifteen machines using fast ethernet. Tulip
based ethernet cards provide some of the best performance. The addition
of Gigabit ethernet (21, Saphir) provides negligble improvement in
performance. But the use of Myrinet showed substantial improvement for
clusters exceeding fifteen machines. These conclusions were drawn for
clustering applications that require heavy interprocess communication.
One such application would be performing a Fast Fourier Transform.
The talk was quite interesting, and the impression I got is that Linux has
a predominant future at Lawrence Livermore Labs. In fact I believe they
are seeking interns. According to the words I heard from Bill Saphir,
"The ideal candidate would likely have home based "Linux Hacking"
experience." In other words, one who has set up and configured a linux
system at home. And of course, I believe you would have to be enrolled
in some sort of college curriculum.
brian
Biblio:
Saphir, Bill, Linux for Scientific Computing, December 9, 1999
http://www.nersc.gov/~wcs/recent_talks/linux4scientificcomputing.pdf
New Supercomputer Packs Powerful Punch, December 20, 1999.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/12/20/BU62963.DTL
-- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ **************************************************************************** * To UNSUBSCRIBE from the list, send a message with "unsubscribe lug-nuts" * in the message body to majordomo@saclug.org. Please direct other * questions, comments, or problems to lug-nuts-owner@saclug.org.
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