[FRIAM] Practical Parallelism

[Owen Densmore]

On Oct 7, 2006, at 10:29 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> Turns out there is a poll being taken on some mail lists on the topic
> of new parallel hardware and if/how it will be used:
>    Parallelism: the next generation -- a small survey
>    http://www.nabble.com/A-small-survey-tf2337745.html
>
>      -- Owen

OK, so we've had an interesting interchange on Distribution /  
Parallelization of ABM's.  But what I'm interested is a bit more  
practical:

Given what *we* want to do, and given the recent advances in desktop,  
workstation, and server computing, and given our experiences over the  
last year with things like the Blender Render Farm .. what would be  
the most reasonable way for us to take a step or two toward higher  
performance?
   - Should we consider buying a fairly high performance linux box?
   - How about buying a multi-processor/multi-core system?
   - Do we want to consider a shared Santa Fe Super Cluster?
   - What public computing facilities could we use?

And possibly more to the point:
   - What computing architecture are we interested in?

I'll say from my experience, I'm mainly interested two approaches:

   - Unix based piped systems where I don't have to consider the  
architecture in my programs, only in the way I use sh/bash to execute  
them to make sure they work well in parallel.  In plain words: good  
parameter scanning, or piped tasks (model, visualize, render) using  
built-in unix piping mechanisms with parallel execution of the  
programs.  I've done this in the past with dramatic increase in  
elapsed times.  And its dead simple.

   - Java or similar based multi-threaded approaches where I need a  
bit of awareness in my code as to how I approach parallelism, but  
*the language supports it*.  I'm not very much interested in exotic  
and difficult to maintain grid/cluster architectures, I'm not at all  
convinced for the scale we're approaching that they make sense.  And,  
yes, Java is good enough.

In other words, given Redfish, Commodicast, and other local  
scientific computing endeavors, what would be interesting systems for  
our scale of computing?  I.e. reasonable increase in power with  
modest change in architecture.

Owen