Comments on: Supercomputer applications for the developing world. http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-applications-for-the-developing-world-375 Free science and engineering in the global public interest Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:53:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Jonathan http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-applications-for-the-developing-world-375/comment-page-1#comment-1359 Jonathan Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:22:07 +0000 http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-applications-for-the-developing-world-375#comment-1359 There's an issue here with energy efficiency, in that datacentres and even work/home PCs are already a measurable proportion of US energy consumption. The trouble with massively-distributed systems is that having a node 'ready for work' but not actually *doing* anything is tremendously wasteful - you want the overall system load average to be rather high. Also, you don't necessarily want to do the computation on a mesh of OLPC XOs, since that would require them to be in use for a large proportion of the day, which shifts the energy burden from the developed world to somewhere that's already got supply issues. Tricky balancing? Interesting. There’s an issue here with energy efficiency, in that datacentres and even work/home PCs are already a measurable proportion of US energy consumption. The trouble with massively-distributed systems is that having a node ‘ready for work’ but not actually *doing* anything is tremendously wasteful – you want the overall system load average to be rather high.

Also, you don’t necessarily want to do the computation on a mesh of OLPC XOs, since that would require them to be in use for a large proportion of the day, which shifts the energy burden from the developed world to somewhere that’s already got supply issues.

Tricky balancing? Interesting.

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