[Beowulf] Three notes from ISC 2006

[Kevin Ball]

Patrick,

>  
>  From you flawed white papers, you compared your own results against 
> numbers picked from the web, using older interconnect with unknown 
> software versions. 

  I have spent many hours searching to try to find application results
with newer Myrinet and Mellanox interconnects.  I would be thrilled (and
I suspect others might as well, but I'm only speaking for myself) if you
would take these white papers as a challenge and publish application
results with the latest and greatest hardware and software.

  Microbenchmarks are not sufficient to determine application
performance.  Everyone benefits from there being more information
available on application performance;  End users, because they can make
better choices, and vendors because they learn where they can improve
things.

  If I'm wrong, and there really is a site out there somewhere with
application performance on new hardware and software, please point it
out.  Thanks!

-Kevin