It is not so much about parallel programming experience but about scientific software development career path. Quite often parallel skills are needed anyway. A former colleague and a good friend of mine explains it quite nicely here:
http://software.ac.uk/blog/2012-04-23-work-scientific-software-engineers-recognised-academia Yes, we had a number of long debates about the topic. There is a feeling that scientific software is much better funded in the US than elsewhere and respectively software developers are a more valuable asset there (hence the brain drain). But then again they spend a lot more on the hardware too. The software spend is still insufficient if you listen to Jack Dongarra and others. On 24 September 2012 22:41, Bogdan Costescu <bcoste...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 _______________________________________________ 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
