On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 6:57 PM, Andrew Holway <andrew.hol...@gmail.com> wrote: > In Germany, at present, there is I believe a > fairly significant net surplus if compute resource as our scientists > try to wrap their heads around parallel programming to take advantage > of this exponentially increasing resource.
I beg to disagree on both parts of the phrase. First, Germany has indeed a significant amount of HPC resources, but I wouldn't call them "net surplus". If you know of HPC resources which are lightly loaded, please let me know and I'll pass the info to the people with a chronic lack of compute time :) Secondly, there are quite a number of scientists in Germany who already know parallel programming well. But I've listened to several talks and following discussions on what needs to be done to take advantage of their skills. Everybody agrees that something needs to be done, to make these skills more valuable, but in the end not much is felt by those scientists. Somehow adding "parallel programming experience" to a CV doesn't seem to increase chances of getting hired or a higher income. Other criteria seem much more important... but these other criteria are often not correlated with HPC knowledge. Which then results in "scientists try to wrap their heads around parallel programming" as you mention. Some of the scientists with the valuable knowledge choose to go away from Germany; some might eventually come back but on a higher position (afterall, they have the foreign experience!), where the parallel programming knowledge is not important or the busy schedule doesn't allow using it in practice. Sure, there are also exceptions... but as the problem is already recognized and discussed, the exceptions remain few. Not sure if this is limited to Germany. Any foreign opinions ? Cheers, Bogdan _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
