[Beowulf] MS HPC... Oh dear...

[Joe Landman]

Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

> Then it'll have soon better drivers than linux too for highend network 
> cards,
> who no longer will release.

Quadrics/Myrinet/Infinipath folks... care to comment?  Somehow I don't 
really think that this makes sense, cutting off a $4B+ market growing at 
60+%/year in order to service a market of questionable size, growth 
rate, and interest, not to mention longevity, but stranger things have 
happened.

> And in the end what matters is that visual studio 2005 and newer is 
> simply 20% to 50% faster for most codes
> than GCC. GCC suffering from bugs everywhere with pgo still and somehow 
> it isn't really faster for K8.

???  I have heard VS called many things.  Fast is not one of them.

> Who will be so stupid to port his parallel program to MPI?

Er.... uh.... maybe those folks who want the performance that a 
distributed memory application can provide?  Hey I like OpenMP, I think 
the programming paradigm is great. It is hard to get good performance on 
shared memory above certain sizes of CPU.  Your code starts looking a 
great deal more like an explicitly parallel code (MPI) than a shared 
memory code.

> Waste of time! They work for windows or they don't work at all!
> 
> Let's all grow up. MPI will be soon history when m$ takes over.

Hmmmm.  I rarely bet, but I would bet against this.

[...]

> Now you can of course still keep running your years 80 software and hope 
> it'll keep working in future, but in how far all this
> is realistic is not real visible. One day you'll retire and then there 
> is not many left that will run that software.

Curiously enough, software I wrote/compiled using QuickBasic 4.5 in 1988 
still runs on my XP laptops.  No rebuild.  There werent many DOS/windows 
versions of fortran available back then that a grad student could afford.

> 
> [...]
> 
> Vincent


-- 

Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
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