When Wu Zixian left the Central South Building of the Normal University under the affectionate gaze of his senior sisters from other schools, Gao Fan was in the reference room of the Chemistry Building of Peking University looking at his fellow seniors with dark circles under his eyes, feeling overjoyed.
"You said you waited in line for five hours last night and only got two hours to wait in line. Do you need to wait in line like this?"
Gao Fan asked Yang Kai.
Yang Kai was woken up by Gao Fan while he was sleeping on the couch in the reference room. At this time, he was still a little angry. He glared at Gao Fan and said, "What do you mean by roll? Who doesn't line up like this?"
Yes, if I hadn’t gone early, I wouldn’t have been able to make it in these two hours.”
Yang Kai took a fancy to Gao Fan's previous research on rare earth catalysts and claimed that he could help him design a calculation model to calculate the optimal ratio of rare earths.
In the past few days, Yang Kai had spent all his sleep and food, checking a lot of information, and finally came up with a model. According to him, it could only be regarded as a preliminary result.
With the model in hand, the next step is to actually calculate it. The calculation amount of this model has exceeded human capabilities and must be completed on a computer, and this has become a more difficult task than deriving the model.
There is an IBM 4341 medium-sized computer in the public computer room of Peking University, equipped with 40 terminals, which can accommodate 40 people at the same time. There are more than a thousand people in the school who need to use computers, so the computer time is extremely precious.
At the end of each month, the school computing center will issue statistical tables to various departments within the school to calculate the computer time required by each department for the next month, and then allocate the computer time based on a complex algorithm. Factors considered include but are not limited to the project.
Importance, status of department, title of researcher, relationship with computing center, etc.
Sometimes there will be some vacancies in the computer time schedule. For example, a department applied to use 38 terminals during a certain period, and the remaining 2 terminals were not suitable for the computing center to be allocated to other departments, so these 2 terminals were allocated to other departments.
The computer time of each terminal is freed up, which is called scattered computer time, and the school's scientific researchers are allowed to apply for temporary use.
In addition, sometimes the scheduled machine time in the plan may encounter situations where users are unable to come due to temporary commitments. The computing center stipulates that users who are late for 15 minutes will be disqualified. The machine time is also classified as sporadic machine time and is open to the outside world.
.
In order to avoid the backdoor phenomenon in the application for scattered machines, in fact, to avoid getting involved in the trouble of allocating scattered machines, the computing center stipulates that the application method for scattered machines shall be on-site, first come, first served.
Well, in human terms, it’s actually just queuing up.
Queuing is a very common method in China nowadays. If you want to buy something rare, such as train tickets, movie tickets, export-to-domestic products, or a good part of a pig, you have to queue.
The most fair way to distribute scarce supplies is to queue up. In order to buy a train ticket, some people bring their mats and military coats to queue outside the train station ticket window 12 hours in advance. If you can't bear this hardship, just
Don't expect to buy tickets.
The Department of Chemistry has never been a big user of computers. The computer time allocated to the Department of Chemistry by the Computing Center is very limited. It is not the turn of a young man like Yang Kai who has just graduated from school to use it. If he wants to do calculations, he can only go to the Computer Center.
There are scattered machine hours, which means he has to queue up.
The sporadic computer time of the computing center is mainly concentrated in the second half of the night. Some elderly gentlemen are too old to stay up late. There are also some researchers who have to go to work during the day and cannot stay up late at night to work, so the computer time in the second half of the night is relatively limited.
Relatively loose.
It is said to be loose, but only for those who are qualified to apply for flight hours. There are a large number of people like Yang Kai on campus who are not qualified to apply for flight hours. Their eyes are fixed on the few flight hours in the second half of the night, so they
It's starting to "involve".
Last night, we could see from the computer time schedule that between 0:00 and 6:00 in the morning, the computer room had a total of 16 hours of scattered computer time. Calculated based on the fact that each person can apply for 2 hours of computer time at a time, there can be a total of 8 hours.
One lucky person will get the chance to fly.
At 10 o'clock in the evening, Yang Kai took his book and horse to the door of the computing center. At a glance, there were 10 people in line in front of him, and he was the 11th. He was not discouraged, but put his horse on the
At the back of the queue, sit down and read a book under the light of the door and wait.
Based on his experience, he knew that some people who had made reservations for the flight often did not come to board the flight in the middle of the night. The reasons were said to be business trips, meetings, illness, etc. In fact, it was just that they did whatever they wanted when they applied for the flight. Now they feel that
I was tired and didn’t want to come, so I gave up.
This world is so wonderful. While some people are agonizingly queuing up to wait for their flights, others can make reservations and not come. Those people queuing up outside will not complain about the latter, but are even grateful.
, thanked them for occupying the pit for him, and gave it to him without taking any money.
What Yang Kai is waiting for is the opportunity given up by these "good Samaritans". He can even see from the schedule who will perform such "good deeds".
Hard work paid off. Yang Kai waited from 10pm to 3am and finally got two flights in line. When he walked into the computer room with his head held high, there were more than a dozen people behind him waiting silently.
With the favor of fate.
Yang Kai returned to the data room after coming out of the computer room, wrapped himself in some clothes and fell on the old couch to catch up on his sleep, until he was woken up by Gao Fan's knock on the door.
"How's it going? Have you calculated the results?"
Gao Fan asked Yang Kai.
Yang Kai yawned and said: "The calculated results are not in line with what I expected. I have already thought about where the problem lies. I will modify the model again, and then I have to get on the computer to calculate it."
"How about..., I'll line up for you next time." Gao Fan hesitated for a while before saying.
From his original intention, he doesn't like queuing. How painful is it to stand in line for five hours in the early morning just to use the computer for two hours?
The 4341 is said to be a medium-sized machine with 4MB of memory and 1 million operations per second. In future generations, it will not even be qualified to be a cash register, right? Thinking that he has to queue up for two machine hours of such a machine, Gao Fan
I wish I could be depressed for a quarter of an hour.
However, Yang Kai was his senior brother after all, and the purpose of getting on the computer was to help him calculate the model, so how could he have the nerve to watch from the side?
"It's useless for you to queue up." Yang Kai waved his hand, "The computing center is only open to teachers, and students' queuing up will be invalid. Otherwise..."
He didn't say any more. The subtext was understood by everyone. The most indispensable thing in the school is students. If students can help line up, wouldn't it be more difficult?