Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi,comp.parallel.pvm From: Kamran Karimi Subject: Re: Why explicit message passing?? Organization: World Lynx, Inc. Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 17:58:43 +0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Message-ID: Hi, Ian Bush wrote: >I think that is the vital point. Though the latest wonderful CS >solutions may be incredibly elegant and to many conceptually >much simpler than explicit message passing, if they don't perform >they ain't going to get used. This is further reinforced by >the fact that, at least here in the U.K. on the machines to >which I have access, you have to `pay' for the high performance >computing resources in some some sense, either by having a finite >quota of node hours available, or in real money. Ouch, the magic >word pay, and suddenly performance becomes even more important, >for a 10% improvement in performance becomes 10% more science >you can do this year, which means 10% more papers at the end of >the year. And what is your quota of node hours dependent upon ? >You guessed it ... The amount and quzlity of Science you did >with your last allocation. The situation will remain the same as long as there are a small number of people wanting to use and pay for such systems. The hardware availability problem will improve as there is more demand for such systems. So having more distributed programmers will allow hardware manufacturers to make more machines and also lower the prices. >That said I also take Kamran's point that there are alternative >methods out there that are becoming more efficient, and traditionalist >"Fortran + message passers" like myself should not close our eyes >to them. Who knows, 10 years hence they could be competitive. If >they do markedly ease programming distributed memory boxes, great ! >( Ermmmm, no, actually not great, if everybody can code them maybe >I'll be out of a job :>) ) I hope this happens sooner than 10 years from now (no, not you loosing your job :-) -Kamran