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To: drmorgan who wrote (13499)	10/22/1997 1:40:00 PM
From: Bearded One	Respond to of 24154

Could a system with a bunch of Pentiums running NT do this? I'm serious with this question. If not is the problem just with scaleability? Here are some of the questions: 1) How much data movement is there? Are the results done at one workstation needed at 10 others? Or can all the workstations work seperately without talking to each other a lot? If the workstations don't need to talk to one another very much, then a bunch of NT workstations will do fine. I'd prefer something faster like OS/2 or DOS(!), or some optimized UNIX, since NT will spend a lot of time doing NT stuff rather than the science stuff. If the workstations have to talk to each other a lot, then you're dead. Something that takes hours on a supercomputer can take months or years on distributed workstations depending on bandwidth requirements.

To: drmorgan who wrote (13499)	10/22/1997 1:46:00 PM
From: Harvey Allen	Respond to of 24154

Derek- I don't know if enough Pentiums could do the same but some day your going to be able to E-Mail your problem to the system and get the answer E-Mailed back (if you can find it in all the spam). Harvey

To: drmorgan who wrote (13499)	10/23/1997 12:50:00 PM
From: Justin Banks	Respond to of 24154

Derek - Could a system with a bunch of Pentiums running NT do this? The only responses I read to your questions where Bearded One and Harvey. Harvey may be right, but that's a looooooong way off. To Bearded One's response I'd add the following : No. In addition to the bandwidth and communication latency issues introduced by a a cluster of computers, these sorts of problems require the ability to manipulate huge amounts of data, far more that will fit into the address space of a pentium. There's a reason why the machine in the press release has over 150,000 MB of RAM. The address space limits on NT limit the size of solveable problems to far below the level this machine is designed to handle. -justinb