I use both. I build and maintain a number of web sites by connecting from
my Mac to my rented server (I still rent an actual server, not a virtual
machine, and have 1.5 TB of disk storage linked to it).

But for work I use a Hadoop cluster, where I run Map/Reduce jobs using
Python (mostly) and Perl via streaming, sometimes both at the same time
(one for the mapper, the other for the reducer). The 400 million record
WorldCat database is my playground. I hate Java and have refused to learn
it. But I might learn Scala for Spark.

Not sure what else you're curious about.
Roy

On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 7:52 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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
>