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Brian, <br>
<br>
Excellent post! I'm glad you switched out of lurker mode to
contribute, and while I have your attention, I'm still waiting for
you to e-mail me that video of me riding the mechanical bull at
SC08's closing reception in Austin. ;) <br>
<br>
Everything you say is 100% correct, but I don't think that really
explains the low traffic on this list. I joined this list in late
2007 or early 2008. In my time on the list, I don't remember many
nuts-and-bolts questions about PXE, MPI, etc. Sure, they came up,
but I remember most of the discussions about were about more general
HPC topics: The design of IBM's Roadrunner system, industry news ,
AMD or Intel's latest processors, the latest gee-whiz gizmo from
vendor X, etc. <br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Prentice </pre>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 03/10/2016 07:27 PM, Brian Dobbins
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAFkGP2=y1H6695K=TQkwnwAU7ks_M=QXOvbL6G88BdTAEewWtg@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<div dir="ltr"><br>
<div>I like to think that RGB can be 'summoned' by mentioning
his name a few times in a thread... and then magically he
appears, waxing poetically about some interesting area of
Beowulfry / HPC, and then vanishes in a puff of equations.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So that I'm actually contributing something meaningful and
not wistfully remembering the past, I'll add that I think the
low traffic is simply because <i>building</i> systems has
become much easier - there's plenty of open-source or
proprietary tools if you're inclined to do it yourself, and
plenty of vendors who'll ensure you don't need to. Clearly
there's been a large increase in HPC usage over the years, but
the vast majority of those systems (>98%?) are ones that
operate at a scale where not <i>much</i> needs to be 'figured
out' - eg, a flat network topology so you don't need to ensure
hop-aware node selection for jobs, parallel file systems that
'work' and give improvement without requiring you to recompile
a kernel, rip your hair out, etc.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>As a corollary to this, years ago most places were still
'experimenting' with clusters - at universities, they were
often run by a research group or a department, tasked to a
narrow area, and serving a small handful of users. That meant
that tinkering with them was very doable - you want to take
the 12-node cluster down for two hours to try a new network
driver that might help your QCD code via better latency? Go
for it! Now, clusters are no longer an 'engineering project'
by a handful of grad students or linux geeks, they're a
fundamental, central resource for research communities, and
they're larger, serving many more users, and often managed by
dedicated teams of IT staff. When you tried to tinker with
that network driver six years ago it wasn't a problem. But
now you want the IT department that's running a production
cluster 'appliance' to give you root access to try some beta
driver to get a few percentage faster results on their
500-node cluster? Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and
label that as 'unlikely'. ;)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>In short, I think the environment we operate under has
changed considerably, leading to less traffic about the nuts
and bolts of clusters - </div>
<div>if you no longer need to wrestle with your PXE boot
configuration files because some distribution or tool handles
that all for you, you no longer need to post your frustrations
and questions to the list for help, right? (I say that
because I think I did it once..) At the same time, the <i>usage</i> landscape
has diversified quite a bit - so fewer people know as much
about the whole field, and thus certain topics garner fewer
comments. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>All in all, though, it's a list with some incredibly
experienced people -- maybe it's worth thinking about a better
way to use this list as a resource? For example, instead of
it just being a 'How do I do <X>?" thing, perhaps once a
month someone (*cough*Chris Samuel*cough*) gets a volunteer to
write a post about their recent challenges/experiences/etc.?
Just an idea; I know I rarely post questions here, yet when I
hear a talk about something, I always have a bunch of thoughts
about it. Thoughts?<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Cheers,</div>
<div> - Brian </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 11:48 AM,
Prentice Bisbal <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:prentice.bisbal@rutgers.edu"
target="_blank"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:prentice.bisbal@rutgers.edu">prentice.bisbal@rutgers.edu</a></a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span
class="">On 03/10/2016 01:34 PM, Jeff Becker wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
On 03/10/2016 10:32 AM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
This list used to get A LOT more traffic. Not sure
what happened over the past few years. I miss the
witty banter and information I used to get from all
that traffic, but I definitely don't miss Vincent.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
:-)<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</span>
It just occurred to me that if you know who Vincent or RGB
is, you're probably an old-timer on this list now.
<div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5"><br>
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</blockquote>
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<br>
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