Huh. maybe I'm out of touch but I thought it was *hard* to find laptop slower than 1.5Ghz or with less than 512mb and 100base-t. I bought an hp laptop well over a year ago and it was 1.5g, 512m w/40gb. And it was about $2100 as I recall. Perhaps that's concidered a lot for a laptop. I thought it was in the middle. -brad

I agree.... the fabled days of Supercomputers kinda died when the Cray's became obsolete and lost their awe and allure... Curt William Donzelli wrote: -- Curt Vendel & Karl Morris ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Atari Museum http://www.atarimuseum.com The Atari Explorer http://www.atari-explorer.com

On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 22:50, Tom Jennings wrote: Well Bletchley ran 10 MKII Colossus machines breaking Lorenz ciphers by the end of WWII; I'm not sure if those exactly qualify as supercomputers but it's a far cry from humans using mere machanical calculators. I'm not sure of valve count on the later machines but the MKI was around 1500 valves. Output was by hardcopy; input was via a paper tape reader running at 5000cps - not bad for 1940's technology. Programming was via plugboard; there was no concept of machine memory back then. It gets nice and cosy in the room housing the rebuilt Colossus example cheers Jules

Vintage Computer Festival declared on Monday 23 February 2004 05:03 pm: Supercomputers are following a trend we've seen already with "office computing". Office-computing as I'll call it for lack of a better name, started out as the IBM mainframe (or Unisys or Univac or ...) sitting in the machine room at the 'center' of the corporate infrastructure, and was gradually more attached to users; still the vast majority of number crunching stayed in one central location. Next was the outflux of independent (non-interconnected or loosly-connected) PCs that at most had some ethernet connecting them together, in a mostly peer-to-peer type fashion, with the situation now at a point where there's vast tracts of PCs with some high-horsepower 'magic glue' at the center holding them together (stuff like print servers, disk servers, web servers, etc). Likewise, we've seen Supercomputing go from very centralized machines - vector processors like the Cray-1, Astronautics ZS-1, CDC Cyber 205, etc. - to clusters of machines such as the ever-present (typically Linux-based) clusters of machines that are fairly symmetric and don't have a whole lot of glue, other than shared filesystems and network switches, between them. This stage is like the outflux of PCs in the 80s to early 90s. This also includes other things like IBM's SP-type systems, Sequent (now IBM) NUMA-Q stuff, the Sun F6800's we've now got at work with their "Fire Link" intereconnect, etc. The next stage (which some are working on, like the people at Cray) is going to be a more asymmetric distributed machine, looking somewhat like the current corporate IT infrastructure of a bunch of remote PCs or thin clients that are fairly dumb with some high-horsepower backends[1]. Basically, you'll have lots of small, fairly stupid processors that are tightly coupled to some segment of memory, with some smaller number of "master" processors that "farm out" jobs to them to do on their segment of memory. So, basically, a tree-looking infrastructure with memory at the bottom, memory coupled processors above that, and above that system controllers that control things like I/O and manage the memory-coupled processors. So far, IBM is coming somewhat close to this model with their BlueGene systems that they're working on, and Cray has a project that is funded by DARPA (or someone else at that level of the government) which is going in that direction - Burton Smith (if I've got his name correctly), the senior engineer from Cray, came to Purdue to discuss this project towards the end of last year. Well, enough looking into the crystal ball for now. Time for me to get back to studying/planning what to do with my 11/750. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCS --- http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:40:24 -0500 Patrick Finnegan <pat(a)computer-refuge.org> wrote: I have to disagree here. There is an important difference between a "Linux cluster supercomuter" and a NUMA machine like e.g. the SGI Origin / Onyx: A Linux cluster consists of independent, loosely coupled machines with independent main memory, each runing it own operating system instance. A NUMA machine consists of tight coupled compute / IO units, runing a single operating system instance on all CPUs and a global shared memory. Big NUMA machines are IMHO supercomuters, where Linux PeeCee clusters are not. -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 07:46:02 -0500 Patrick Finnegan <pat(a)computer-refuge.org> wrote: Ahh, sorry. I missed this subtile but significant difference. Back to the topic of Flash mob computing: Somthing like this was done some years ago by a German TV show. You could send your PeeCee to them. During a nightly show they set up all PeeCees, net-booted Linux and build the bigest Linux cluster of that time. Over 500 CPUs. -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/