Hi all, thanks for the very interesting discussion. It's getting a bit "philosophical" so we probably have to agree that we disagree, but couldn't resist adding one more remark:
On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Kenneth Hoste <[email protected]> wrote: > What about libraries? ATLAS? OpenMPI? I doubt they also stay away from > updating those, which is just a potentially harmful as updating compilers. > > The idea is to keep the stack of things you depend upon fixed, whatever > happens. That's very important in the HPC world to (try and) ensure > reproducibility of results of scientific experiments. True. However, if you take that to the extreme, you would have to include also the libc (malloc), kernel, firmware and all the hardware into your toolchain. In fact, I've had issue of results that changed because of a BIOS upgrade... (Indeed use of VMs goes exactly in this direction, but it's another discussion.) Thanks, Riccardo -- Riccardo Murri http://www.gc3.uzh.ch/ Grid Computing Competence Centre University of Zurich Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich (Switzerland) Tel: +41 44 635 4222 Fax: +41 44 635 6888
