Parts of the "Roadrunner shutdown" thread developed into a discussion about the benefits of hiring specialized HPC programmers as an alternative to spending more money on hardware.
For the benefit of folks searching the archives, here is one of the messages in that sub-thread, from Brian Dobbins, which contains many points of interest: http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2013-April/031271.html including: Why it may be worth hiring a good developer if there are a moderate to high number of nodes in the system already - with rough dollar cost estimates. A number of programming- and compilation- level things which can easily be fixed by a programmer with the right expertise, which will greatly improve performance, but which might not be known by programmers who are primarily interested in science. Also, how common they are. (I wonder: if this is true, then perhaps half or more of HPC cluster time is being wasted on this stuff, in environments where many types of jobs are being run. I figure the people who devote clusters to one or a few programs probably invest in writing and tweaking those programs well.) Having a skilled programmer to ensure to that the results are correct, not just that there are results at all, or results faster than before. "So that's my lengthy two cents in defense of why it's /very often/ favorable to hire HPC specialists over more hardware . . ." I know many people tend to like short chatty messages on mailing lists, but I like ones like this, for which Brian's apology: "(PPS. Sorry for the length!)" absolutely does not apply. - Robin _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
