We (Sequent, now bought by IBM) sold 64 processor servers to people
who needed them (the main market was large databases) so, yes, there
is definitely a market for larger systems. It's cheaper to build a big processor
farm out of a Beowulf style cluster, but it's not always easy / possible to
split up your application over something like that. If you're generating
fractals, it's easy, for other applications, it's not.
> Perhaps effort should be placed into software development processes and
> tools that deny race conditions the right to be born, rather than depending
> on testing on a 16-processor system to find them expeditiously :-). And
I wish you good fortune, sir. When you've acheived that, come back and
tell me, and we'll stop testing stuff ;-) It's always better to not code bugs in
the first place, but that's not the world we live in ...
> there is a whole discipline of software performance engineering to build
> performance in from the start. Advances like that would be a *huge* win for
> the Linux community, given our (relative) freedom from corporate-world
> limitations like deadlines, sales quotas, programmer salaries, and
> full-color brochures.
I'm all for encouraging good programming practices. In a way that's actually
harder in the diverse Linux community with hundreds, nay, thousands of
engineers putting code in. But we should still try - keeping the infrastructure
simple helps, for example. Trying to bug fix badly designed / written code is
pissing into the wind.
M.
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