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S. Wolfram announces the *symbolic* and highly integrated Wolfram SystemModeler. This looks very important by clairdin Economics

[–]claird[S] 0 points1 point ago

This is interesting.

I don't see it the same way, in a couple of regards.

I entirely understand that pertinent times for runs are as you describe. Now we enter the realm of speculation: if SystemModeler, or a future version of it, supports parallelism, then we can imagine a factor of eight speed-up (or a thousand, if running on a cluster or next-generation CPUs). Factor-of-eight takes us from all-weekend to long-day, or long-day to while-I'm-in-class. Factor-of-eight has the potential to be meaningful.

Where did the "... on a desktop" part enter? If SystemModeler is a winner, surely it'll show up on supercomputers, too. Mathematica itself runs on heavy iron in at least a few installations.

More speculation: this is not just about MPI. I don't know whether you use "MPI" as a synecdoche for all parallelism methods; I can imagine, though, that SystemModeler (eventually) learns impressively clever approaches to distribution that allow interesting problems to be spread over hundreds of cores. Algorithmic research of that sort is exactly the kind now being done.

Finally, I'm far less certain that "[t]he things ... worth modeling ... cannot be modeled ... on a desktop." Maybe it's so; perhaps we'll only know by actually doing the science, and seeing in retrospect how it worked. What I see is that plenty of good and meaningful quantum calculations (for example) have been done over the last century, using a range of computational techniques from pencil-and-paper to top-ten supercomputer. I'm personally skeptical that the only significant modelling left to do now is all at the high end of the hardware range. On another hand, I don't see a quick way to falsify either your claim or mine.

I suspect biologists will feel miffed that you left them out of your list. They certainly have demonstrated an ability to chew up cycles on genomics, molecular modelling, enzymology, ...

And we're having this conversation in /r/Economics; what does that mean?

XML Schema has a bad reputation. A little planning can make it a low-risk, high-reward tool by clairdin xml

[–]claird[S] 0 points1 point ago

Ugh. Well, thirteen hours later, I echo your conclusion: "... pity ..."

"Crockford kept answering his cellphone during his [own!] talk": impressions from the recent keynote by clairdin javascript

[–]claird[S] 0 points1 point ago

I mangled the headline. The quote is about the keynote, but there are comments about all sorts of happenings at the Conference.

XML Schema has a bad reputation. A little planning can make it a low-risk, high-reward tool by clairdin xml

[–]claird[S] 0 points1 point ago

This is interesting; while I don't work often in VS, I bet I can make it do useful things with XML Schema. Or are you saying there's a difference in capabilities between VS and VS Express that applies here? I didn't realize that ...

S. Wolfram announces the *symbolic* and highly integrated Wolfram SystemModeler. This looks very important by clairdin Economics

[–]claird[S] 0 points1 point ago

So true--the part about Wolfram's prominence in what Wolfram does, that is. I don't get the "totally pointless for science" part at all, though; l can imagine lots of uses within hard-core science. I can further imagine that the implementation will exploit processor parallelism. Please elaborate the constraints you see.

S. Wolfram announces the *symbolic* and highly integrated Wolfram SystemModeler. This looks very important by clairdin softscience

[–]claird[S] 2 points3 points ago

Your imagery makes sense to me; I'm fond of collies. At the same time, I could live inside Mathematica for days at a time. My conclusion: whether you end up using it yourself or not, I think SystemModeler will end up being important to you, if only for the knowledge of what others do with it.

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