[Beowulf] Not OT, but a quick link to an article on InsideHPC

[Joe Landman]

On 03/24/2017 12:02 PM, C Bergström wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 11:48 PM, Joe Landman <joe.landman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 3/23/17 5:27 PM, C Bergström wrote:

[...]

>> No issue, and I am sorry to see this happen.  I enjoyed my time using the
>> PathScale compilers.
>>
>> Its sad that an ecosystem chooses not to support innovators.
>
> I must admit that my rough around the edges personality may play into
> this. I don't mince words and when smart people occasionally
> (frequently?) do stupid things - there's a right way to say it and a
> blunt way.. and then there's times when it's just a matter of
> opinions.. So many people lately think LLVM is this magical panacea
> that will fix all their problems.. That camp of people is growing and
> any time you try to explain how craptastic it is on a whole category
> of problems you're met with disbelief at best..

Heh ... I started adding llvm (really clang and hey, no real fortran ... 
grrr) support into my nlytiq project on github, basically to play with 
it.  Compiling Rust with an external llvm?  You don't want to go there. 
On a fast box, with many cores, lots of SSD and ram ... many hours.

I've been curious about how well/poorly it does at code generation as a 
base for other tools.  Specifically I'm interested in julia and making 
things easy to tie in to julia.  And R, python, Perl (5 and 6), octave, etc.

I've not done serious testing with it yet, but, for the moment I've left 
it the non-default option.

> Maybe I'm wrong and it will "just work out in the end"..

Some things seem to work well, and it has some level of interest from a 
broader community.  This gets to what I think the core of marketing 
efforts are/should be for small folks like us.

Target ubiquity.  Make it bloody easy to install, use, operate.  For a 
compiler, this should be little more than a path change, and maybe some 
flags.  For an appliance, it should just work.

Making things so simple that they just work, and do so correctly, 
consistently, reliably ... is a non-trivial task.  You had the joy of 
many ABIs, each with the variants of bugs.  I had the joy of dealing 
with (*&(*&^$^$^$** kernel changes, *^^&^^$%*(& driver bugs ... and 
don't even get me started on firmware, *&^&%$$#%%$ OFED versions, 
RPM-only/RedHat specific functions/code/installation mechanisms.

If I get to SC17 this year, definitely gonna need to grab a bunch of 
folks for a commiseration night ...

>
> #rant
>

-- 
Joe Landman
e: joe.landman at gmail.com
t: @hpcjoe
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