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From: eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel,comp.arch
Subject: Re: stigma of Parallel Programs (was Seeking)
Message-ID: <9990@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 3 Aug 90 12:06:06 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu
Reply-To: eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
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Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu

In article <9932@hubcap.clemson.edu> aglew@oberon.crhc.uiuc.edu
(Andy Glew) writes:
>Finally, several people contacted me saying that they have lent their
>parallel applications to other researchers in the past, but refuse to
>do it any more because they have been "burnt" by the experience - the
>other researchers have "trashed" the contributed codes and attacked
>the authors of the contributed benchmarks.
>    This is a sad commentary on the lack of basic etiquette in the
>research community.

Yes, this is very true.
It's part of the black art of benchmarking.
It's made harder because 1) parallel programs are more difficult to
write or modify [a controversial statement, itself], 2) lack of
consistency in parallelism paradigm.  The technical problems.

Ideally, a science of computing should have a freer exchange of
information.  But this conflicts with marketing concerns [companies with
policies which forbid release of benchmark data], "security"
concerns [remember many of those with vested interests in performance
are also concern about security, remember who paid for the first
computers], embarassment of "not quite good enough results,"
tenure, and "embarassingly parallel problems."  The social problems.

--e. nobuo miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
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