[Beowulf] Open source and the Draft Report of the Task Force on High Performance Computing

[Douglas Eadline]

What the hell, I'll bite, and I did not read the full report.

  "There has been very little open source that has made its way into broad
  use within the HPC commercial community where great emphasis is placed
  on serviceability and security."

This sentence seems to imply that serviceability and security
are holding back open source in HPC while ignoring the
general uptake of HPC by industry. While there is merit to
this claim, there are many other "hold backs" to commercial
uptake for "Blue Collar HPC". It remains to be seen if these
other hold backs are addressed, if open source
solutions will see a greater uptake, thus creating
a real economic incentive for such features.

  "There is a better track record in data analytic
   recently with map/reduce as a notable example."

Well sure, a much, much bigger market changes the
economic equation.


--
Doug




>
> The URL:
> http://energy.gov/seab/downloads/draft-report-task-force-high-performance-computing
>
> One piece I found particularly interesting:
>
>    There has been very little open source that has made its way into broad
> use
>    within the HPC commercial community where great emphasis is placed on
>    serviceability and security. There is a better track record in data
> analytics
>    recently with map/reduce as a notable example. This is less of an issue
> for
>    universities or national laboratories but they represent no more than
> about
>    10%-15% of all HPC usage. Of course, one cannot “force” the adoption of
> open
>    source but one should also not plan on it being a panacea to any
> ecosystem
>    shortcoming. A focus investment effort within universities could expand
> the
>    volume of open source and increase the chances that some of the
> software
>    output could become commercialized. It should be noted that the most
>    significant consumption of open source software is China and it is also
> the
>    case that the Chinese are rare contributors to open source as well.
>    Investments in open source or other policy actions to stimulate
> creation are
>    likely to produce a disproportionate benefit accruing to the Chinese.
>
>
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--
Doug

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