But that is only true if you assume 100% conversion of gas to electricity which is obviously not correct. A really high end gas powered power plant may convert 40 % of that into electricity. Which, transported and used for heating even further reduces the efficiency. So lets say, overall, this gas I used corresponds to 3000 kWh of actual electricity. I am still under the apartment category :(

- 2500-5000 kWh I live in an apartment

wow, you americans...

Those ranges are a scary. As a family of 4, in a semi detached house in north-western europe we use 3000 kWh of electricity and 1000 m3 of gas a year! According to your numbers I would use more than 3 times more if I was in the US.

No wonder that people say that if the whole world would like like Americans,we would need two to three planets to support us...

Can you elaborate please, it seems like a quite nice machine for some basic note typing/calendar/web/ssh stuff.

Obligatory genious from "The Parking Lot is Full" :
http://plif.courageunfettered.com/archive/wc263.gif

Thanks for the comment!

running a variety of fluid dynamics codes.
 

This is indeed the key. Our models are Java/semantic web type of things, with many, many threads and inter agent communication. almost no math. I guess in that case it would not make too much sense to move to these architectures.

San somebody who has actually worked with such machines enlighten me about its performance on tasks that are not floating point intensive? Our simulations mainly push many,many objects around, with relatively little, or no floating point math in them.

Do such machines still make sense, or are we better off with a bunch of general purpose CPUs clustered together? How do they compare to Suns Niagara cpus that have umpteen hardware threads in them ?

Yeah, you are right. Except that you can not choose not to play in this one...

Of course, you mean *when* not if...

That has been tried a number of times, and each time ended in a epic fail. For a case study, talk to any Aussie about Rabbits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia or about the cane toad see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad

If it is that resilient and fast growing, you will not be able to control it anyhow. Many, many examples of invasive species throughout the world show this. So, just learn how to harvest it and make biodiesel/biogas/electricity out of it. No intensive agriculture, ferilizers or herbicides needed. Plus, this might piss off the corn/ethanol lobby enough to actually start taking action against the grass. Ether way, we win. Oh yeah, biodiversity losses, but that is shafted anyway...

Thats interesting. I dont think that human heuristics beak down. We simply have not learaned to live in a world of so much information and technology yet. And the funny thing is, no mater how hard we try, we never will be, so, we keep on trying...

He basically just wants to have an Open Source solution available if he must use it in the first place.

You know, the devil you know...

Well, clearly it is. They would not have bothered otherwise...

You would like to know the moment you booted cryptoSkyNet :)