[Beowulf] Docker vs KVM paper by IBM

Ellis H. Wilson III ellis at cse.psu.edu
Wed Jan 28 11:08:33 PST 2015


On 01/28/2015 02:00 PM, Gavin W. Burris wrote:
> Researchers do not want to be sysadmins, and if they do, they
> aren't publishing.

This statement is so infuriatingly incorrect I'm embarrassed to even be 
responding to it.

You do remember this is the Beowulf list, originally comprised of 
researchers who decided to be their own sysadmins/hardware vendors/etc 
in order to get their research done, right?

Even in today's mainly post-big-iron age, there are plenty of 
systems-level CS researchers (like I was not more than 6 months back) 
who ran their own clusters simply to get their work done.  No, I really 
don't feel like working with my IT staff every time I want to change the 
toolchain or recompile such-and-such magical cache replacement algorithm 
into this version of the kernel.  Imagine that.  I just want to do it.

I have no doubt there are tons of point-and-click researchers out there 
who don't want to be sysadmins.  But making such broad strokes on this 
list is asking for flames.

ellis


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