The cost of running sims now and then?

C

Cardcounter

Well-Known Member
Back in the 1970's it cost more than $40,000 in 1970's dollars to run a blackjack simulation that only simulated a few million hands. I wonder what the cost of blackjack simulation today for a few billion hands is. A couple hundred or less. I'm just guessing on todays cost I read about the cost in the 1970's in the book Playing Blackjack as a Business.
 
Cardcounter said:
Back in the 1970's it cost more than $40,000 in 1970's dollars to run a blackjack simulation that only simulated a few million hands. I wonder what the cost of blackjack simulation today for a few billion hands is. A couple hundred or less. I'm just guessing on todays cost I read about the cost in the 1970's in the book Playing Blackjack as a Business.
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it's the cost of a desktop PC.
 
Cardcounter said:
Back in the 1970's it cost more than $40,000 in 1970's dollars to run a blackjack simulation that only simulated a few million hands. I wonder what the cost of blackjack simulation today for a few billion hands is. A couple hundred or less. I'm just guessing on todays cost I read about the cost in the 1970's in the book Playing Blackjack as a Business.
Click to expand...

I'm currently running 25 million rounds a second. What's a second of PC time cost?
 
Cardcounter said:
Back in the 1970's it cost more than $40,000 in 1970's dollars to run a blackjack simulation that only simulated a few million hands. I wonder what the cost of blackjack simulation today for a few billion hands is. A couple hundred or less. I'm just guessing on todays cost I read about the cost in the 1970's in the book Playing Blackjack as a Business.
Click to expand...

$40,000? wtf are u talking about, u just use a computer, and a computer in the 70s didnt cost 40k, but it wud take longer to sim.. a sim of 100 billion hands doesnt cost anything except the price of the program and the price of letting it run for several weeks (billions would take that)
 
SilentBob420BMFJ said:
$40,000? wtf are u talking about, u just use a computer, and a computer in the 70s didnt cost 40k, but it wud take longer to sim.. a sim of 100 billion hands doesnt cost anything except the price of the program and the price of letting it run for several weeks (billions would take that)
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Several weeks? I can run 100 billion rounds in a bit over an hour.

But, an IBM 709, like that used by Julian Braun, cost more like a $million. I ran my first Monte Carlo sims on an IBM 7040 in the 60s that costs several hundred thousand.
 
QFIT said:
I ran my first Monte Carlo sims on an IBM 7040 in the 60s that costs several hundred thousand.
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But "computer money" is like a casino comp. It's not real. When I was in college in the 70s, walking across campus to the computer center to feed my cards into the reader, then come back the next day to pick up the job, there was always an account balance and how much it cost to run. Did I have to pay for it? No, and if it ran out they just gave me more.
 
21forme said:
But "computer money" is like a casino comp. It's not real. When I was in college in the 70s, walking across campus to the computer center to feed my cards into the reader, then come back the next day to pick up the job, there was always an account balance and how much it cost to run. Did I have to pay for it? No, and if it ran out they just gave me more.
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In the early 70's & before, companies that couldn't afford computers often paid to timeshare one from another company; IOW: they paid per amt of time used, and others used the same computer. That's why you saw an account balance. Even within companies, and universities they sometimes charged back each department for what time and resources were used. Maybe it was paid by your department on behalf of all students, though it may have been a paper transfer between the user department and the computer department. Still, SOMEONE had to pony up for the hardware software, operators, and huge electric bills to run those machines.

Most modern networks, even Window$ servers have an accounting feature, though it's not frequently used.

Back in the day a guy doing research like Thorpe would surely have had to pay for his computer use out of his research grants Someone NOT affiliated with a university or company that used timeshare would probably have had to pay much more ..... if they could find one to take their project at all.

You mean that comp dinner my wife and I had yesterday wasn't real? Aure seed OK :grin:
 
GeorgeD said:
Back in the day a guy doing research like Thorpe would surely have had to pay for his computer use out of his research grants Someone NOT affiliated with a university or company that used timeshare would probably have had to pay much more ..... if they could find one to take their project at all.
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Not necessarily. In the late 70s I allocated computer usage funds at a University. Much of the funds did come from grants. But I also allocated funds not paid by grants. This was 'paper money' in the sense that no funds were transfered. Essentially I granted the funds from the University. But it represented a part of our real money budget and had to be finite and proportional to actual costs as the funds spent by grants were real money billed on the same cost basis.
 
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QFIT said:
Not necessarily. In the late 70s I allocated computer usage funds at a University. Much of the funds did come from grants. But I also allocated funds not paid by grants. This was 'paper money' in the sense that no funds were transfered. Essentially I granted the funds from the University. But it represented a part of our real money budget and had to be finite and proportional to actual costs as the funds spent by grants were real money billed on the same cost basis.
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Even with paper transfers, I would have thought that the University had a budget to allocate $X for computing to say the Computer Science Department, who then had to allocate $Y to student use, $Z to faculty etc. Then Departments had to stay within budgeted or transfer "paper funds" from another account to balance so the whole university didn't overspend.

IOW: someone was paying for the costs in real $$$ and could have put an actual $$$ amount on each user account and department if only for accounting purposes.

Anyway, there was a real cost in the end, and I expect it was much larger than today buying a desktop PC today and running SIMS.
 
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