Comment by mehrdadn

7 years ago

> People where I work have workstations with more than 1TB of ram.

Wow. What kinds of workstation tasks need this kind of memory, if I may ask?

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mehrdadn

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geocar  7 years ago

Analysis; some model building.

It is popular to buy a bunch of servers (or worse, host them on AWS), a bunch of sysadmins, and so on, so you can support a couple smart analysts with some complex hadoop java streaming somethingrather, but it is much cheaper to just buy them beefy workstations and use awk: A HP Z8 G4 with 1.5TB ram is under £30k, and it's hard to get a sysadmin that has any brains for that, let alone two and servers...

wl  7 years ago

Genome assembly and computational fluid dynamics are the two that come immediately to mind.

  • mehrdadn  7 years ago

    Wow. They need that much data in memory at once? I could understand needing a ton of secondary storage for both, but this much primary storage would seem to imply they need random access to terabytes of data which is a little huge to swallow!!