Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!bbn!bbn.com!slackey
From: slackey@bbn.com (Stan Lackey)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Single user vs. shared (was Re: Killer Micros and vectorized code)
Message-ID: <53714@bbn.COM>
Date: 19 Mar 90 15:12:16 GMT
References: <51771@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <100598@convex.convex.com> <52661@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1990Mar18.023523.4034@ultra.com> <52817@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
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Reply-To: slackey@BBN.COM (Stan Lackey)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
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In article <52817@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks) writes:
>In article <1990Mar18.023523.4034@ultra.com> shj@ultra.com (Steve Jay) writes:
>>If someone measured the time that I spend using the stapler, tape
>>dispenser, or pocket calculator that I have in my office, they'd
>>find that each sits idle 99.9...% of the time.  Does this mean that
>users in milliseconds.  The computer is an entirely different animal.
>You CAN have exclusive access to a CPU in a suitably parallel resource
>composed of Killer Micros, yet efficiently share it with others.
>
>By sharing your computer among a small group of people, large enough
>to bring the utilization level up to perhaps 50%, you end up with
>more computer, not less.

Interesting discussion going on here.  I think though that the choice of
computing style has to be based on the workload.  The situation of a small
group (10?) running large batch style jobs vs. a large group (>25?) running
lots of small interactive jobs seems to inherently fit different models.
The model of say a publishing company with 25 writers all using desktop
publishing seems to be more suited to distributed workstations; highly
interactive, compute bound (constant reformatting, spellcheck, etc); if
this workload were centralized, it seems far more horsepower is necessary
to deal with the overheads of sharing and interconnect management, to get
the same response speed.  
-Stan