Bill Hacker wrote: > Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote: >> Rupert Pigott wrote: > > > But a brief scan of those that were 'free' brings up the question: > > 'Just who is it that actually NEEDS this anyway?' > > Bill Hacker
Well Rupert Pigott gave some pretty convincing explanations of the usefulness of the concept. Personnally i see the problem from the other side, i am a physicist in a lab which has a cluster, the lab below us also has a cluster. Besides pissing contests, who has the biggest, i have hard time finding the real usefulness of this stuff. Basically the cluster is used by people as a collection of independent computers running independent computations. Probably few of these guys if any has any notion of concurrent programming. On the other hand i know an american physicist who has a cluster and does real clustered computations on it, in fact QCD computations on the lattice. This is the work of his life, he has learnt MPI and other hard stuff to exploit parallelism. People like that are so rare, and can get funding both for the harware and software, that this doesn't justify, in my opinion, lots of efforts from free software developers. Of course developers develop what they like, i have absolutely nothing against that. People see advantages in distributed filesystems. Now AFS is 30 years old, its rejuvenated version ARLA is 10 years old, who is really using that in the real world? Of course i don't know much but i don't know a single installation using it. This says a lot about the usefulness or the necessity of these concepts. -- Michel Talon