[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Axel Thimm]

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 10:32:34AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Le Jeu 31 mai 2007 10:10, Axel Thimm a écrit :
> > On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 09:51:31AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> >> Well either they have different purposes and you don't have the
> >> problem of deploying the same fortran modules on them,
> >
> > Why not? The scientists develop on their desktop PC, test whether the
> > code actually gives numbers that make sense for their model, and once
> > the bits and bolts are in places run the large jobs on the real
> > rack-mounted X-less number crunchers.
> 
> At that point they can and should take the time to rebuild it for the
> large number cruncher. Just dump the developper/scientist local builds
> on the expensive production systems is a very bad idea (and that's not
> a problem limited to numeric stuff)

Well, climb up the thread and see that the centos running cluster at
Patrice's site is not carrying the proper Fortran. Even further up the
thread you'll find references that you don't even have all libraries
on the target system, or not the ones you really need.

FWIW even w/o neededing any other special fortran features building
with FC6's fortran and running on RHEL4 or FC4 was improving some code
performance by a factor of the range of 30%. So instead of publishing
your paper in 3 months you can save a month of numerics, produce more
papers, get a higher budget (where budgets depend on the amount and
quality of publications, e.g. almost everywhere), use the budget to
hire more physicists. That's an unbeatable argument.

(well, it's simpliyfied as the above could imply that all numerical
physicists do is to fire up number crunchers, although some bad
mouthed people will say they always knew that ;)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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