Brian,
Excellent post! I'm glad you switched out of lurker mode to contribute,
and while I have your attention, I'm still waiting for you to e-mail me
that video of me riding the mechanical bull at SC08's closing reception
in Austin. ;)
Everything you say is 100% correct, but I don't think that really
explains the low traffic on this list. I joined this list in late 2007
or early 2008. In my time on the list, I don't remember many
nuts-and-bolts questions about PXE, MPI, etc. Sure, they came up, but I
remember most of the discussions about were about more general HPC
topics: The design of IBM's Roadrunner system, industry news , AMD or
Intel's latest processors, the latest gee-whiz gizmo from vendor X, etc.
Prentice
On 03/10/2016 07:27 PM, Brian Dobbins wrote:
I like to think that RGB can be 'summoned' by mentioning his name a
few times in a thread... and then magically he appears, waxing
poetically about some interesting area of Beowulfry / HPC, and then
vanishes in a puff of equations.
So that I'm actually contributing something meaningful and not
wistfully remembering the past, I'll add that I think the low traffic
is simply because /building/ systems has become much easier - there's
plenty of open-source or proprietary tools if you're inclined to do it
yourself, and plenty of vendors who'll ensure you don't need to.
Clearly there's been a large increase in HPC usage over the years, but
the vast majority of those systems (>98%?) are ones that operate at a
scale where not /much/ needs to be 'figured out' - eg, a flat network
topology so you don't need to ensure hop-aware node selection for
jobs, parallel file systems that 'work' and give improvement without
requiring you to recompile a kernel, rip your hair out, etc.
As a corollary to this, years ago most places were still
'experimenting' with clusters - at universities, they were often run
by a research group or a department, tasked to a narrow area, and
serving a small handful of users. That meant that tinkering with them
was very doable - you want to take the 12-node cluster down for two
hours to try a new network driver that might help your QCD code via
better latency? Go for it! Now, clusters are no longer an
'engineering project' by a handful of grad students or linux geeks,
they're a fundamental, central resource for research communities, and
they're larger, serving many more users, and often managed by
dedicated teams of IT staff. When you tried to tinker with that
network driver six years ago it wasn't a problem. But now you want
the IT department that's running a production cluster 'appliance' to
give you root access to try some beta driver to get a few percentage
faster results on their 500-node cluster? Well, I'm going to go out
on a limb and label that as 'unlikely'. ;)
In short, I think the environment we operate under has changed
considerably, leading to less traffic about the nuts and bolts of
clusters -
if you no longer need to wrestle with your PXE boot configuration
files because some distribution or tool handles that all for you, you
no longer need to post your frustrations and questions to the list for
help, right? (I say that because I think I did it once..) At the
same time, the /usage/ landscape has diversified quite a bit - so
fewer people know as much about the whole field, and thus certain
topics garner fewer comments.
All in all, though, it's a list with some incredibly experienced
people -- maybe it's worth thinking about a better way to use this
list as a resource? For example, instead of it just being a 'How do I
do <X>?" thing, perhaps once a month someone (*cough*Chris
Samuel*cough*) gets a volunteer to write a post about their recent
challenges/experiences/etc.? Just an idea; I know I rarely post
questions here, yet when I hear a talk about something, I always have
a bunch of thoughts about it. Thoughts?
Cheers,
- Brian
On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Prentice Bisbal
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 03/10/2016 01:34 PM, Jeff Becker wrote:
On 03/10/2016 10:32 AM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
This list used to get A LOT more traffic. Not sure what
happened over the past few years. I miss the witty banter
and information I used to get from all that traffic, but I
definitely don't miss Vincent.
:-)
It just occurred to me that if you know who Vincent or RGB is,
you're probably an old-timer on this list now.
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