[Beowulf] Re: Why Do Clusters Suck?

[Joe Landman]

Craig Tierney wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 12:42, David Mathog wrote:
>>On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 Douglas Eadline wrote:
>>>So why do clusters suck?
>>Would that they did suck - it would make cooling them a lot
>>easier.  Unfortunately while most of them blow pretty well their
>>sucking sucks.

Sometimes they neither suck nor blow, as their fans are clogged, and 
they basically overheat.  But that is another thread.

[...]

> Our biggest problem is the immaturity of development
> tools.  Another way to put that is "my compiler doesn't reproduce
> the bugs in the other compilers my users are accustom to using"
> or "Fortran isn't a standard, it is a suggestion". It is a rare creature
> that writes clean, portable code.  It is all too common to hear
> developers tell me things like "does it work if you turn off bounds
> checking?".  I spend way too much time with new users trying to explain
> to them the difference between 'code porting' and 'bug fixing'.  

<commiserate />

me:   "how do you know it works"
them:"it compiles with no errors"
me:   "no... how do you know it works, functions correctly?"
them:(puzzled look) "it compiles with no errors ..."



-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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