[Beowulf] interesting article on HPC vs evolution of 'big data' analysis

Kilian Cavalotti kilian.cavalotti.work at gmail.com
Wed Apr 8 21:28:23 PDT 2015


On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 11:31 AM, Prentice Bisbal
<prentice.bisbal at rutgers.edu> wrote:
> I got annoyed by this article and had to stop reading it. I'll go back later
> and try to give it a proper critique, but obviously disagree with most of
> what I've read so far. Right of the bat, the author implies that Big Data =
> HPC, and I disagree with that.

It is annoying, indeed! :)
But I guess it's at least partly because some of its points make
sense. Like you probably, I don't agree that MPI is killing modern
HPC, but it's definitely true that the best tool or language for HPC
is the one that gets the science done.

That being said, I feel like the underlying pitch is that MPI is too
hard if you don't exactly know what you're doing. Well, newsflash, yes
it is. There are probably better alternatives for non-programmers,
higher-level languages which allow to focus more on the science than
on the nitty gritty of passing messages. But it's like saying that C
is so hard that it's killing innovation and that everybody should use
Javascript instead: kind of, but not really.

Cheers,
-- 
Kilian


More information about the Beowulf mailing list