[Beowulf] Open source and the Draft Report of the Task Force on High Performance Computing

["C. Bergström"]

On 08/28/14 07:26 PM, Gavin W. Burris wrote:
> Hi, Bill.
>
> This is perplexing...
>
> So, the Linux kernel and supporting tools that make the operating system aren't
> being factored in here?  The compiler?  The libraries?  If "very little open
> source" has "made its way into broad use within HPC," what OS are the majority
> running if not Linux?  This seem to be greatly uninformed, or pushing an
> agenda.  The only way I can see this excerpt as even remotely true would be if
> you applied a very narrow survey to a specific application set.  But that
> narrow view does not apply to a full operational stack or all of HPC in
> general!  I'm baffled, because this does not jive with my lay of the land.
baffled you say?

Lets go down the list of things you mentioned

supporting tools - Allinea/Totalview and the various performance 
analysis tools - are they open source? (partially maybe, but not completely)

compiler - I'll refrain from selfish self advertising, but with the 
exception of gcc - anything else I've seen on a cluster and when people 
care about performance - they likely use something which is closed 
source. (I don't know many Gordn Bell winners using gcc.)

libs - Off the top of my head.. MKL, NAG, cuBLAS and a few others aren't 
open source. (Ok LAPCK, OpenBLAS and a few others are open source... got 
me here)

MPI - From what I've seen the larger OEM and system integrators end up 
effectively creating a closed source version from one of the open source 
things.

The linux kernel is open source, but what about the highly modified 
compute node OS which are common? I doubt there's a single customer who 
has requested the source and published those modifications..

Good schedulers?
---------
We can go deeper into domain specific stuff and then it's really mixed 
bag for what's open and what's not...

The original post was probably clickbait and irrelevant anyway. Who cares?

./C