Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc

[Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>]

On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 08:48 -0500, Eric Van Hensbergen wrote:
> > Or are you saying that no HPC app comes even remotely close to being
> > portable?
> >
> 
> There are multiple degrees of portability.  Most of the world
> considers POSIX the portability layer (and APE won't cut it on our end
> for the reasons stated above).  But even then, HPC apps are large and
> complex beasts -- most take a few weeks to a month to figure out how
> to compile and tune even on a "standard" system.  The problem is there
> is increasingly less diversity on the UNIX OS space, so the "standard"
> is rapidly moving from POSIX to Linux/X11.

  Being part of Sun's HPC community I've come to the conclusion that
HPC market is really unique and different from the corporate/enteprise
market in a couple of key areas. The HPC guys seem to be much more 
about in-house software development than enterprise guys. And this
actually means that if you can offer them a real differentiator 
(even at the level of new programming languages) you have way better
chance of winning them over than you would have with an enterprise
account.

  I also see that computing in general is now on the brink of a new
era where we would have to start exploiting parallelism and adapt
our languages and models for that. And no, exploiting parallelism
doesn't mean better OpenMP or better MPI. It means rethinking the
way we do computing. And that, IMHO, means that Plan9 might just
have another chance of entering mainstream computing. Mark my words,
in 5-7 years -- POSIX threads and MPI are going to be as important
as punch cards and COBOL are now. 

  Just my 2c.

Thanks,
Roman.