Religious wars (was Re: [Beowulf] A press release)

[Joe Landman]

Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Joe Landman wrote:
> 
>> Rumor has it that C-c C-o C-f C-f C-e C-e instructs emacs to make you 
>> a cup of coffee. :^
>>
>> I personally want an editor without all these fancy things:  just 
>> syntax highlighting for C/C++/Perl/Bash/Tcsh/Fortran/config files, 
>> that has line numbers, and intelligent wrapping/splitting.  Can run 
>> from a GUI. Does split windows.
>>
>> gvim does all these things.  But you have to be very careful typing. 
>> Because it it vi.
>>
>> If Komodo had window splitting and intelligent wrapping, it would be 
>> good.
>>
>> I looked at kate, but it requires kde.
>>
>> pico/nano are ok, but they don't do line numbers, or split windows, or 
>> intelligent wrapping.
> 
> I don't know if it has all the features you want -- line numbers?  Ugh.
> You must be coding in runes -- oh, wait, I mean Fortran;-) -- but you

Hey, we have a fair number of current customers with Fortran needs.  It 
is not going away any time soon (didn't I say somethin bout them 
language wars?)

I like line numbers to help me figure out if I have a really long line 
of text.  Most text editors do a poor job of handling this case, happily 
wrapping it, without telling you, so your key navigation across the long 
lines looks really funky.

And back to the beowulf topic ...

I seem to have discovered the issue I was running into last week.  Some 
sort of weird timing problem with MPI_Waitsome on OpenMPI with 
Infiniband (and shared memory).  I tested the IB stack and MPI stacks, 
and all report full functionality.  I can run MPI over the IB.  And it 
works well.  The problem is when I run this code which uses MPI_Waitsome 
for part of its algorithm.  With gigabit ethernet, it behaves well 
(under OpenMPI 1.2.7-rc2).  With  Infiniband, it does not.  Also the 
OpenMPI seems to get awfully confused if you have IPoIB enabled (mostly 
for diagnostics for the user).  Turning that off helped stability.

Of course, since it was remote, I used vi (vim) as my editor.  And a 
little pico.

This is a Fortran 9x code.  I added a few extra debugging bits around 
the troublesome MPI calls.  Nice to do remotely, hard to do with a 
remote gui over slower links.

I may just give in, and go full force into VIM.  It is active, has lots 
of features, and I already know basic vi from use for years.  And its 
undo feature doesn't blow chunks.


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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