Computer power is like boobs. You can never go to...

2011-12-13T04:13:29.505+02:00

Computer power is like boobs. You can never go too big.

hello Bogdan, thank you for your comments. I agree...

2010-12-11T10:44:24.609+02:00

hello Bogdan, thank you for your comments.
I agree with you, however, depending on what you try to achieve and your budget, you can go for the nVidia GPU's with CUDA technology but those eat a lot of electricity power also(moreover your limited to 1, 2 GPU's/PC, depending on the motherboard), if you really want to be "green" then go for the i3/i5 if you can allocate ~$300-350/piece(if you buy a bunch).
I totally agree with Delphi not being good, however there is "free pascal compiler"(closest to Delphi language) which can target 64 bit platform, therefore that shouldn't be a problem.
P.S. you might wanna take a look at XtremeOS(a linux distribution).

Hello, Dorin. Nice insight, but I can't help p...

2010-12-11T01:11:52.986+02:00

Hello, Dorin. Nice insight, but I can't help point out some things I don't completely agree with.

First off, history taught me that there's no such thing as "enough computing power"; the closest thing to it would be "enough computing power for now". I'm still pumping loads of money to get my hardware stay in line with my expectations and, believe me, I'm not a rocket scientist or something like that.

The second thing I'd like to discuss is the fact that bringing computers to work together is a real challenge. I've done this for various purposes during my career, including building image rendering farms (for 3D Studio Max and the like) and massive data processing clusters in a research project on malware applications. Hard disk drives may be slow, but they're not irreplaceable: I've successfully used solid-state drives connected through SATA-3 controllers and worked like a charm. Before SSDs became so cheap, I was using RAM-disks - a more expensive approach, but you need to invest in order to get the best bang, you know. For me, the biggest bottleneck was network communication, although I used 1Gbps equipment for interconnections. Fiber channels between NICs seem to be a little too radical for me, not to mention that they're hyper-expensive.

Another big issue I hit was keeping the systems in sync, while also increasing redundancy. Using appropriate RAID setups I managed to fight off the possibility of losing data when drones eventually gave their last breath under stress.

It might be true that Pentium cores are extremely cheap (especially the Prescott bread which comes with hyper-threading and add extra power to the grid), but you're gonna invest MUCH MORE in the electricity bill and conditioning. Remember that Pentium cores eat up a lot of electricity and they're not quite efficient: they warm up and need extra ventilation, which brings us again to shedding money. I'd personally go for an Intel Core2Duo chip or the slightly more expensive Opteron CPUs from AMD.

We've got used to imagining computers each time we mention computing power. Clusters and grids have been around for some time, gained popularity and people liked the idea. Well, they may NOT be the best pick for delivering tremendous amounts of power, especially when dealing with floating point operations. I think that both the IBM Cell CPUs in PlayStation consoles as well as nVidia's new video GPUs can deliver more than a simple processor can. Haven't tried them yet, but they may be a much simpler solution.

And although I'm a huge fan of Delphi, I don't think that it would scale to the size of a grid. Why? That's simple. As a 32bit-only language, an application written under it won't be able to manage the amount of memory necessary for computing-intensive tasks. I'd personally choose something lighter and more flexble. Python is the first thing that comes to mind.

That's my two cents. Looking forward to your next blog post :)

Comments on The Spirit of Delphi: Computing power: how much is enough?!

Computer power is like boobs. You can never go to...

hello Bogdan, thank you for your comments. I agree...

Hello, Dorin. Nice insight, but I can't help p...