What electrical components take 16 hours to boot up?

What mechanical operation requires 16 hours of prep?

Any insight? I read the article, and it had very little in the way of information.

Here at work it is my job to fix IT problems. When I see a server I see a box of problems. There is always something that can be "fixed."

A police officers job is to "catch bad guys." Whenever they see a person they see a "bad guy" they need to "catch."

Police are not your friends unless you help them "catch bad guys."

This is the most concise explanation of a quantum computer I have ever read.

Then I remember he signed up for the circus.

Writing programs is pretty easy... relatively easy to the near impossible task of debugging programs.

I'm an artist that uses code to create my work (openFrameworks, processing, vvvv, quartzComp, libcinder, etc.). I code 15-18 hours a day. I am ALWAYS thinking about code.

My bugs bend my mind into a pretzel. I couldn't imagine someone who hardly cares about this putting in any real effort.

What kind of programs do people who do it only for a job write?

when rocks fall by gravity and break into pieces?

But Dell has given us so many memorable market defining products!

ALU * clock is meaningless measure. Hardware scales easily, code does not.

In HPC we call it "pleasantly parallel," nothing is embarrassing about it! =]

If your code:
-scales to OpenCL/CUDA easily.
-does not require high concurrent memory transfers
-is fault tolerant (ie a failed card doesn't hose a whole day/week of runs)
-can use single precision flops

Then you can use commodity hardware like the gtx series cards. I'd go with the gtx 560ti (GF114 gpu).

Make nodes with:
quad core processors (amd or intel)
whatever ram is needed (8GB minimum)
2 x gtx560ti (448) run in SLI (or the 560ti dual from EVGA)

Basically a scaled down Cray XK6 node. http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/products/xk/CrayXK6Brochure.pdf

It all depends on your code.

Do some "creative coding" with p5 in Java ( http://processing.org/ ) or OpenFrameworks in C/C++ ( http://www.openframeworks.cc/ ).

Make some art, it's rewarding.