Programming benefit of two quad quad core servers

Question

Programmers often whine that if only they had a faster/more memory/more cores machine they would be much happier (they never say more productive).

Can anyone think of a programming benift for whatever language/protocol system of having two idle quad quad core servers available in addition to the programmers workstation.

I can't because most compilers/interpreters are often single treaded per say and follow a compile/check syntax phase then a link/binding sequence. And no ability to farm the compile phase, where many source files are compiled, exists even in modern IDEs.

Answer 1

distcc: a fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler. Systems really do build much faster.

Now you could as well run distributed build tools on your developers machines, as they are unlikely to be building at the same time.. but well having dedicated build clusters is way cooler.

It also makes practical daily automated builds and'll help you score highly on the Joel Test.

Answer 2

Is your code modular? If so, your compilation can definitely be farmed out. You just have to build several modules in parallel. Only the later (less-intensive) phases, like linking, cannot be parallelized.

And then the things don't stop after compilation. You can run various analysis and you can run your tests. All of these are easily parallelizable.

As for IDE support... I hope you don't need to recompile the entire project in your daily usage of your IDE. You can take benefit from those servers by using them for automated builds.

Answer 3

In the earliest years of my programmers career I thought about direct relation between workstations horse powers and my personal productivity. As my experience evolved I found I was totally wrong. What is more important - productivity is gained by the tools.

But yes, I will be happier if my workstation will have more MHz/memory that I currently have. Why? Comfort. From development point of view I doubt it will free even couple of minutes per day only because compiler is running faster.

Answer 4

Systems exist that make several separate devices networked together appear as a single machine, which is termed "single system image". This is especially widespread in Linux, e.g. kerrighed.