On 04/09/2015 12:28 AM, Kilian Cavalotti wrote:
On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 11:31 AM, Prentice Bisbal
<prentice.bis...@rutgers.edu> wrote:
I got annoyed by this article and had to stop reading it. I'll go back later
and try to give it a proper critique, but obviously disagree with most of
what I've read so far. Right of the bat, the author implies that Big Data =
HPC, and I disagree with that.
It is annoying, indeed! :)
But I guess it's at least partly because some of its points make
sense. Like you probably, I don't agree that MPI is killing modern
HPC, but it's definitely true that the best tool or language for HPC
is the one that gets the science done.
Actually, it was the first few paragraphs where he compared 'big data'
tools to MPI. He's comparing apples to oranges. Different horses for
different courses. I finally read the full article, and will post a
proper rant/review soon.
The latter part of the article, where he talks about MPI being
abstracted at the wrong level, and being too low-level, are legitimate
arguments, Its what first section that annoyed me.
That being said, I feel like the underlying pitch is that MPI is too
hard if you don't exactly know what you're doing. Well, newsflash, yes
it is. There are probably better alternatives for non-programmers,
higher-level languages which allow to focus more on the science than
on the nitty gritty of passing messages. But it's like saying that C
is so hard that it's killing innovation and that everybody should use
Javascript instead: kind of, but not really.
Cheers,
_______________________________________________
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
