Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)

[talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr]

Bill Hacker wrote:

> Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:
>> Rupert Pigott wrote:
> 
> 
> But a brief scan of those that were 'free' brings up the question:
> 
> 'Just who is it that actually NEEDS this anyway?'
> 
> Bill Hacker

Well Rupert Pigott gave some pretty convincing explanations of the
usefulness of the concept. Personnally i see the problem from the other
side, i am a physicist in a lab which has a cluster, the lab below us also
has a cluster. Besides pissing contests, who has the biggest, i have hard
time finding the real usefulness of this stuff. Basically the cluster is
used by people as a collection of independent computers running independent
computations. Probably few of these guys if any has any notion of
concurrent programming. On the other hand i know an american physicist who
has a cluster and does real clustered computations on it, in fact QCD
computations on the lattice. This is the work of his life, he has learnt
MPI and other hard stuff to exploit parallelism. People like that are so
rare, and can get funding both for the harware and software, that this
doesn't justify, in my opinion, lots of efforts from free software
developers. Of course developers develop what they like, i have absolutely
nothing against that. People see advantages in distributed filesystems.
Now AFS is 30 years old, its rejuvenated version ARLA is 10 years old, who
is really using that in the real world? Of course i don't know much but i
don't know a single installation using it. This says a lot about the
usefulness or the necessity of these concepts.


-- 
Michel Talon