os that rather uses the gpu?

[Robert Myers]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 11:22 PM, JD <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> >
> Listen Robert, you can disagree on the usefulness
> and utilization for solving large problems.
> But that hardly grants you the license to disparage
> another member of this list.
> If you do not think your comment:
>  > If you think flops is a good measure of the science you can do, you
>  > should probably be in a different business.
> is at least disparaging, if not outright nasty.
> Please refrain from making them.
>

No.  Sorry.  You listen.

You repeated a mindless refrain as if you knew what you were talking about,
when, in my never sufficiently humble opinion, you don't know what you're
talking about.  If that's disparaging you, so be it.

Money that could be going to actual science is being wasted because of the
kind of clueless cheerleading that bureaucrats love and that you have put
the weight of  your opinion behind.

This is a technical forum, not a debating society.  Science is awash already
in useless flops.

In one of these long-running public debates, I pointed out to a national
decision-maker how relatively meaningless and frequently wrong NOAA's
hurricane season predictions have been.  Guess what?  The most recent
forecast was wrapped in all kinds of weasel words.  That won't stop them
from drawing their paychecks and burning megawatts producing useless
pictures.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a totally meaningless computation
from the Department of Energy about the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico
moving up the East Coast.  What did they advertise as the scientific basis
for the calculation?  The money that had been dumped into the code over the
years ($100 million) and how many hours of "supercomputer" time it took.
 The calculation was junk, but because huge resources had been spent on it
and it made a nice color plot, the Wall Street Journal published it.

It's not just about opinions and your sense of good manners.  The
flops-are-good mantra is ruining computational physics, and everyone goes
along with it, even though the emperor has no clothes.  You might not have
liked what I said, but it accurately reflected my feelings on the subject.
 If you can't respect that, then why should I respect you?

Robert.
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