On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 01:37:05PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote: > >On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:28:12AM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote: > >>- do we need exascale anyway? would the world be better off with a thousand > > > >Yes, EFlops is entry level for projects like > >http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/neurologist-markam-human-brain/all/ > >and if you want invididually accurate neural emulation > > sure - such suggestions are pretty easy to put together, but they do > not answer the question: should it be done, and at what cost? I
Working real AI or personal immortality are quite useful, at least for some people, I could imagine. > still think > they're really being used as a fig-leaf to cover the erection people > get when imagining the "next-a-scale" facility. I dislike big systems, and be it only becase they're resource intensive (and hence not exactly egalitarian computing). Unfortunately, a lot of very practical problems require quite massive resources, and preferably under everybody's desk who would care to get one. > simulations like this are extremely dubious in that they're fundamentally > limited by the quality of raw configuration data. it is If you look at holistic approaches like http://www.openworm.org/ and http://www.si-elegans.eu/ these are quite easy to validate, given a sufficiently diverse behaviour library. Markram is more basic research in comparison, to obtain the parameters for the biologically accurate simulations. > emphatically not clear that neuroscience is primarily limited by the > scale of machines to run simulations. It is pretty much limited, if your primary input is the annotated connectome, at few nm resolution. > >>power-efficient systems? if power is an important TCO component, why aren't > >>we optimizing for it already (in any sized facility)? > > > >I definitely do for my private projects, as 0.25 EUR/kWh are > >a pretty good argument. > > even retail, fully-delivered rates here are half that. but out of curiosity, Well, at least it's 100% fully renewable juice. > does your comment mean that you, for instance, buy arm clusters, or > at least LV versions of x86 chips (and high-core, low-clock models), Yes, both for my personal computing (mostly, just a few old boxes on the Internet, less than kW total) and the dayjob I do that. I would gladly buy ARM cluster-in-a-rackmount, provided the price/performance is right, and assuming you could get these from the usual vendors. > gold/platinum > PSUs, etc? (or just do your compute in a location with cheaper power?) Would love to crunch interesting systems for a living, but that doesn't get the bills paid. I hope to get something done with the Epiphany, assuming they keep the price point and availablity (and also the power envelope). > regards, mark hahn. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
