The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations

This kind of reminds me of an old paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202 Of course, we are no longer in the clock speed doubling era, but computer does get faster still.

If nothing else, they'd enjoy slacking gain[1] by starting their computation with more advanced hardware. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9912202.pdf

But then you've spent more money. You could have just bought more hardware in the future. For a fixed budget, assuming that Moore's Law still holds (dubious, these days), you should wait until the computation will take 26 months on hardware purchased within that budget [0]. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202

Here's a physics paper that analyzes that question. It's a joke paper, but the conclusion is valid (subject to various simplifying assumptions). Their conclusion is that if a computation takes over 30 months to complete, you're better off waiting for faster hardware. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202 The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations Authors: C Gottbrath, J Bailin, C Meakin, T Thompson, J.J. Charfman We show that, in the context of Moore's Law, overall productivity can be increased for large enough computations by `slacking' or waiting for some period of time before purchasing a computer and beginning the calculation.