* Posts by adrianj

2 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2011

Clouds can compete with HPC, say boffins

adrianj

Not a fair representation

As mentioned already by other comments, it's not really telling you anything sensible. The use of speedup rather than RMax is poor, this metric really doesn't tell you what you think it does, it assume Linpack is affected by network performance but it really isn't, and it's comparing two different hardware generations (the HPC system is running on CPUs that are at least 1 generation older than the Azure resources, and likely to be 2 generations old). Given linpack is really just a flop/s engine, you can't compare different generations of CPUs like this.

Will world universities step to cluster challenge?

adrianj

Better things to spend money on...

Whilst this sounds like a nice idea it's simply a lot cheaper for US institutions to take part in this. Finding funding for 6 students to travel to, and stay in, the US for a week is not easy. Given the financial squeeze on UK academia currently there are lots of better things to spend money on.