There was an interesting quote in a lengthy article on computing, in the Business section of Monday’s (Oct 12) New York Times, under the heading of Media Technology. It said ‘Science these days has basically turned into a data management problem.’

The story itself was a good introductory roundup of the differences between working on a PC and working on grids/clouds/clusters etc. Its big point was that students need to be exposed to distributed computing early on, or else ‘They imprint on these small systems, and that becomes their frame of reference. . .’ It then went into how IBM, Google and others are trying to get the young exposed early to the benefits of distributed computing.

But I wonder if it’s true that students default to little, laptop sized projects?