> On Jun 3, 2015, at 9:28 PM, Jed Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > > Barry Smith <[email protected]> writes: >> Richard has access to the hardware > > Is this true? Or he will have hardware "soon"? > >> and is not going to "lie to us" that "oh it helps so much" because >> he knows that you will test it yourself and see that he is lying. > > I'm not at all worried about him lying, but I'm concerned about being > able to sample across a sufficiently broad range of apps/configurations. > Maybe he can run some PETSc examples and PFLOTRAN, which is a good > start, but may not be running in the appropriately memory-constrained > circumstances of a package with particles like pTatin, for example. We > care not just about the highs but also about the confusing corners that > users will undoubtedly encounter.
Even if it "helps" in only 30 percent of applications that is still a good thing (and a great thing politically). Then it becomes an issue of education and proper profiling tools to tell people for their apps that it won't work; so the other 70% is not "confused". Note that Marc Snir today told me that it is perfectly fine if the "largest computing systems", i.e. the LCFs can only provide useful performance for a small subset of all possible applications. Barry
