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

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 08/28/2014 10:17 AM, Joshua Mora wrote:
> The codesign effort pushed by the new requirements/constraints (power and
> performance) is shaking design decision of existing SW frameworks, hence
> forcing to get rewritten overtime to add new fundamental functionality (eg.
> progress threads for asynchronous communication and fault tolerance).
>
> The report, as a holistic view of the challenge, suffers from lack of detail
> although references are provided for some of their statements. It is obvious
> that such effort will require multi year investment in a wide range of
> disciplines. It seems a reasonable amount based on the investments within the
> HW industry that will seek ROI.
>
> I personally think this cannot be anymore a country-only solely lead effort
> and in terms of budget to develop such program, China could be already better
> set. Keeping Intellectual Property is going to be difficult under the pressure
> to deliver within timelines.
>
China clearly has the budget and motivation for this sort of work, but 
the software skills in China are still considerably behind the rest of 
the HPC superpowers. This is something China readily admits, and is 
working to address.* At the pace their, moving though, I imagine it 
won't be long before this is fixed, but a cultural change like that 
would still probably take some time, I'd say 10 or more years.

* My source for this statement is a seminar Bill Tang from Princeton 
University gave a few years ago titled "Perspectives on China’s Role in 
Global High Performance Computing" (see description at 
http://www.princeton.edu/researchcomputing/education/colloquia/).

--
Prentice