Quote:
Originally Posted by TerryP
Some scientific needs for processor time must be insanely heavy loads....
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No question about that Terry. Scientific/engineering computation has always, and will always, take a lot of horsepower. Like much of the rest the software world, the tools have expanded to fit the available horsepower. But the average Desktop these days is much more powerful than the mainframes or yore, and what one can do at the desktop with standard tools (if you don't code it yourself) is very impressive.
The difference between the classical workstations and the "consumer" PC also has narrowed. When I had my Sun (4.3BSD, 20MHz, 16MB memory, 19" screen) the average computer others used was 8086-based, 8MHz, with a 10" to 12" screen, running DOS. The DOS boxes could not even address 16MB memory, let alone use virtual memory. That sort of difference has faded now, though some of the monster 8-core or higher systems come close.
Today, if you have a truly huge problem to solve, you do it on a cluster. Ask Oko about that, since he runs computational clusters.