[BProc] Where BProc relly lives

[Erik Arjan Hendriks]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 11:50:55AM +0100, hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz wrote:
> I was quite surprised to find out that BProc lives at:
> 
>   http://bproc.sourceforge.net
>
> and is active and maintained and has docs and maillist etc. On the
> other hand, assumption that Scyld website will be the first place
> which will point me to BProc news was quite false.
> 
> BProc seemes to be mostly one-man-show by Erik Arjan Hendriks and he
> is not working for Scyld anymore and might not be on good terms
> with Scyld management. Sorry to touch these personal things but I
> think they have large technical implications and therefore should be
> known to cluster developers.

I left Scyld in December of 2002.  The technical implications of my
departure are have been very good for BProc.  My current employer (Los
Alamos National Lab) is funding further BProc development.  Working on
BProc and related things is my full-time job.  Since I left Scyld,
Cray has also funded some of the work adding debugger support to
BProc.  I haven't brought BProc under LANL's umbrella the way I did
with Scyld.  My experience with Scyld taught me to never let your
management get confused about who owns what.

While Scyld uses BProc, they did not support very much development.  A
lot of good integration work has been done by Scyld but the BPRoc
(2.x) version they are currently distributing is remarkably similar to
what I had when I started there.  The changes consist almost entirely
of bug fixes and hooks to facilitate cluster management.  I understand
that a small startup isn't going to fund a large development effort
but the amount of time available for improvement was very
disappointing.  That contributed to my decision to leave but it wasn't
the primary reason.  Since the DOE has made an attempt to fund work at
Scyld but they seemed... umm... uninterested.

There has been MUCH more work improving BProc during the last year
than during the one before it.  During the first 9 months since I
left, the process management was almost entirely rewritten, full
ptrace (gdb, strace) support was added and it was ported to Linux 2.4.
Since then there have been smaller added features, a LOT of testing
and a port to PowerPC.  Anyway, the bottom line is, my leaving Scyld
has been very good for BProc development.

Oh, and yes, I am on bad terms with their management although I'm
still on good terms with the technical people who were there when I
was there.

> (Sorry for this non-technical entry on bproc-users, I hope I'll be
> less off-topic next time.)

No problem.

- Erik
-- 
Erik Arjan Hendriks          Printed On 100 Percent Recycled Electrons
erik at hendriks.cx                   Contents may settle during shipment