Do everything in Java...

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 11:41:28AM -0800, Ziad Hatahet via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 6:12 AM, via Digitalmars-d <
> digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > For speed... I dunno. In the cloud you can run Python on 10
> > instances with little effort,
> >
> >
> But if a single instance suffices, why would you? Probably not a
> popular opinion, but we should think more about resources and power
> usage, even if they're "cheap". Convenience is not everything. As
> engineers, we have duties and responsibilities toward the community
> and the environment. I am not a fan at the
> throw-servers-at-it-until-it-works approach.

I agree. It's not just about conservation of resources and power,
though. It's also about maximizing the utility of our assets and
extending our reach.

If I were a business and I invested $10,000 in servers, wouldn't I want
to maximize the amount of computation I can get from these servers
before I need to shell out money for more servers?

There are also certain large computational problems that basically need
every last drop of juice you can get in order to have any fighting
chance to solve them. In such cases you'd want to get as far as possible
in refining approximate (or partial) solutions before giving up. If it
were up to me, I'd want to squeeze every last drop out of every last
server I can ever afford to buy, since otherwise I might not be able to
go as far as I could have due to too many resources being wasted on
unnecessary or inefficient processes.

But apparently, in these days of economic downturn, we are still
wallowing in enough cash that throwing more servers at the problem is
still a viable business strategy, and not maximizing what we can get
given what we have is an acceptable compromise. *shrug*


T

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth