[Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

[John Hearns]

Atul, welcome to the Beowulf list. My apology if you have posted here in
the past.
I invite you to make a post regarding quantum computing. This is a
fascinating field in its own right.

Please start a thread - I will then make my comparison with guitars.

On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 04:02, atul kumthekar <atul.b.kumthekar at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Regards Quantum, one area is security. Quantum communication for
> exchanging public key. If anyone tries to evesdrop, state collapses and
> receiver can know.
>
> Cheers
>
> On Thu, 15 Oct, 2020, 9:26 pm Lux, Jim (US 7140), <
> james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
>> I don’t know that Quantum computing is something that, say, Bank of
>> America, or the IRS, would be able to effectively leverage.  What they do
>> isn’t computationally complex – the vast majority of the workload is “pick
>> up data from place A, look at it, do something or not, put it back in place
>> A, and potentially generate some new data in place B”, but it’s exceedingly
>> requirements intensive. Consider something simple like handling a monthly
>> mortgage deposit – at the core, it’s “bump current balance with amount of
>> check”, but wait, what if they’re in foreclosure? Or have a forbearance? Or
>> the mortgage is held by an active duty servicemember? And the exception
>> handling is even more complex – what country, state and/or county is the
>> property in, the owner, the lien holder?
>>
>>
>>
>> There are thousands upon thousands of business rules which have to be
>> continuously maintained and audited for regulatory compliance.  The
>> limiting resource isn’t computational horsepower, it’s organizing the
>> thousands of processes, which is primarily a people problem, not a computer
>> problem.  Their existing work and data flows are already parallelized in
>> some sense, and if they need to do it faster, they just add processors or
>> storage as needed.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *atul kumthekar <atul.b.kumthekar at gmail.com>
>> *Date: *Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 8:08 AM
>> *To: *Jim Lux <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov>
>> *Cc: *Oddo Da <oddodaoddo at gmail.com>, John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com>, "
>> beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
>> *Subject: *Re: [Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Spark,
>> Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place
>>
>>
>>
>> with Quantum Computing on the horizon, there may be major change in the
>> direction.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Lux, Jim (US 7140) via Beowulf <
>> beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:
>>
>> Not all offensive..
>>
>> It’s always useful to take a step back and say “well, rather than
>> incremental change X, what about wholesale change Y”.
>>
>>
>>
>> One interesting phenomenon, too, is that once a large, complex system has
>> been around a while, it becomes the embodiment of the requirements that
>> produced it, yet those requirements are not found anywhere (at least not in
>> a coherent single source). So the risk of new implementation is enormous,
>> since the probability of the new system not properly implementing a
>> requirement is large.  If your system is, say, processing airline
>> reservations or income tax returns, the cost of a problem is enormous.   It
>> doesn’t take many multi-million dollar “oopsies” to make the cost of half a
>> dozen skilled software developers to tinker at the edges negligible.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From: *Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org> on behalf of Oddo Da <
>> oddodaoddo at gmail.com>
>> *Date: *Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 4:10 AM
>> *To: *John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com>
>> *Cc: *"beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
>> *Subject: *Re: [Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Spark,
>> Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 1:11 AM John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> This has been a great discussion. Please keep it going.
>>
>>
>>
>> I am all out of ammo ;). In all seriousness, it is not easy to ask these
>> questions because it kind of can be interpreted as offensive - in a
>> nutshell, people may perceive what I am asking as "what have y'all been
>> doing for 20 years? Nothing?".
>>
>>
>>
>> To the points on technical debt, may I also add re-validation?
>>
>> Let's say you have a weather model which your institute has been running
>> for 20 years.
>>
>> If you decide to start again from fresh with code in a new language you
>> are going to have to re-run known models
>>
>> and debate whether or not they fit within error bounds of the old model.
>>
>> That takes effort - which may of course be justified if you make gains in
>> speed, flexibility or being able to use new hardware like GPUs.
>>
>>
>>
>> I understand all this but, of course, not everything has to do what has
>> been done. Hopefully, there are plenty of people entering the field or
>> coming back to it, without any technical debt.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
>> https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>> <https://urldefense.us/v3/__https:/beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf__;!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!bodty4KlKmA1LZygeemiAxXLmSrV-HOO7syq9oZVVW6Rz9HnK7AunQPqYEB-Q7L1Uy0b7KI$>
>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20201020/40830ea0/attachment.html>