I’m just curious. What sorts of computing environments do y’all use/exploit?

For a long long time I used my Macintosh as a sort of terminal tool connected to a Unix/Linux computer where I did my “real” computing. Now-a-days, I still use this set up, but the Unix/Linux environment is increasingly a virtual machine, a “large” multi-core computer, or a “cluster”. More specifically, I have learned to increase my throughput with parallel processing and/or cluster computing. This is advantageous because I do dozens of processes against 10’s of thousands plain text files, and doing such work on against a single CPU is not feasible. Map/reduce is a good thing! Because of parallel processing a cluster computing, I have had to change some of my programming paradigms. The whole thing is very interesting. 

What sorts of environments do y’all use?

—
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame