I just ordered a new computer to replace this one. mat.tepper.cmu.edu has done a great job over the last five years, but it is showing its age. The operating system is woefully out of date, causing ever-increasing security problems. Of course, if it gets out of date enough, the machine becomes “secure by obsolescence” as a buddy of mine (who runs HPUX 9 or so, circa 1995) has deemed his “security measures”.<\/p>\n
I ended up going a little crazy on the new machine, ordering a dual quad-core system (that is eight cores). It is amazing how these multi-core systems have taken over. It also means something important for us operations research people: parallelism is important. I have often been down on the COIN-OR<\/a> people for all the bells-and-whistle they put in their code (I just want a branch-and-cut code: I don’t want to dig through all the stuff about “computing on multiple heterogeneous machines” and so on). But much of their code is already set up for multiple machines (and multiple processors on one machine) and that is going to be important. Multicore is of little use if the software doesn’t take advantage of it. And expecting the operating system to automatically parallelize a complicated optimization program is currently a pipedream. As this article points out<\/a>, for a lot of software, more cores does no good whatsoever. So hurray for the COIN-OR people for thinking ahead on this.<\/p>\n It is interesting to compare the speed of this system with the listing of supercomputers, as given by Top500 Supercomputers<\/a>. I can’t get a clear reading on the speed of the machine I am about to buy, but it may be in the 40-80 Gflop range (can this be? Correct me if I am wrong). Based on the historical graph<\/a>, such a machine would have been the fastest supercomputer in 1993 and would have hit the top 500 at late as 2000. Now under US$7000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just ordered a new computer to replace this one. mat.tepper.cmu.edu has done a great job over the last five years, but it is showing its age. The operating system is woefully out of date, causing ever-increasing security problems. Of course, if it gets out of date enough, the machine becomes “secure by obsolescence” as … Continue reading “New Computer Coming”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-open-source"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}