Re: [9fans] Plan 9 on Blue Gene

["ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net> wrote:

> speaking of higher levels of abstraction:
> given some scientific code i've seen (before this, nothing to do with the things
> running on Blue Gene), i'd observe that fixing some of the algorithms used (which
> is compiler and platform independent activity) will often yield much bigger results
> than (say) compiling it with gcc, xlc, xlf, etc.  you'd be amazed (or perhaps not)
> how naive some of the code can be.

Excellent point. Some of the app code is terrible. I am hoping we'll
prove that we can "go native" and do as well as or better than the
existing apps. At the same time, having just gotten badly burned on
Clustermatic because people wanted to run xemacs on compute nodes and
got unhappy when we said no, I've gotten sensitized to the "wants" of
users. How you respond to stupid demands can make or break your
project. It's hard to take but we're a service industry.

ron