[Beowulf] Frontier Announcement

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Wed, 8 May 2019 14:13:51 -0400, you wrote:

>On Wed, May 8, 2019 at 1:47 PM Jörg Saßmannshausen <
>sassy-work at sassy.formativ.net> wrote:
>>
>Once upon a time portability, interoperabiilty, standardization, were
>considered good software and hardware attributes.
>Whatever happened to them?

I suspect in a lot of cases they were more ideals and goals than
actual things.

Just look at the struggles the various BSDs have in getting a lot of
software running given the inherent Linuxisms that seem to happen.

In the case of what is relevant to this discussion, CUDA, Nvidia saw
an opportunity (and perhaps also reacted to the threat of not having
their own CPU to counter the integrated GPU market) and invested
heavily into making their GPUs more than simply a 3D graphics device.

As Nvidia built up the libraries and other software to make life
easier for programmers to get the most out of Nvidia hardware AMD and
Intel ignored the threat until it was too late, and partial attempts
at open standards struggled.

And programmers, given struggling with OpenCL or other options vs
going with CUDA with its tools and libraries, went for what gave them
the best performance and easiest implementation (aka a win/win).

Of course then ML came along and suddenly AMD and Intel couldn't
ignore the market anymore, but they are both struggling from a distant
2nd place to try and replicate the CUDA ecosystem...