[Beowulf] Re: "hobbyists"

[Ashley Pittman]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 14:41 -0400, Kyle Spaans wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 03:33:19PM -0400, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
> > More specifically for HPC, linux seems designed for the desktop, and  
> > for small memory machines.
> 
> That's funny, because I've heard people get scared that it was the
> complete opposite. That Linux was driven by Big Iron, and that no one
> cared about the "little desktop guy" (Con Kolivas is an interesting
> history example).

Well that depends if you're at a Linux conference or a HPC conference, I
regularly attend both and the Linux folks are convinced they spend too
much time tending to Big Iron and the HPC folks are convinced that they
spend too much time worrying about their mp3's skipping.  I think Andrew
Morton hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that from a kernel
perspective Scientific Computing is more akin to embedded computing than
it is to heavy server workloads and in a lot of cases HPC doesn't
benefit from the attention that Big Iron does get.  The solution for
this would be for the HPC industry to employ more core kernel hackers
however it would seem they are thin on the ground which is ironic as HPC
is probably the one industry where Linux has the biggest market share.

Ashley Pittman.