Inversion

Suppose you had an opportunity to get some applications (open source and otherwise) onto CCS. Which apps would you like to see? I have my own list, but I would like to hear yours. I ask as I know most apps run great on the current mainstream clusters. You know, those myriad of Linux units.

What are your major concerns in getting apps on there? Right now there is a defined lack of apps on CCS. This is not for competitive G2, or for bashing purposes. This is to help us figure out if there really is an interest, or is it just marketing hype. We have been asked to get Scalable HMMer and MPI-HMMer onto OSX. We tried getting it onto Solaris 10, but the build there was 20% slower than under Linux on the same hardware, with optimal build config/options on Solaris 10, and non-optimal under Linux. x64 hardware, and yes, I took great pains to build an x64 binary under Solaris (not easy/default by the way, despite the performance advantages of doing so). Unfortunately, we don’t see OSX or Solaris 10 as long term growth markets, so unless someone wants to fund this work, we are not likely to continue it. CCS could grow, if there is interest (buying installations is not a long term viable solution). So my question is, what apps would generate interest. And more importantly, is there enough interest from you to consider CCS with apps ported from Linux. Not just app ports I presume, but integration. Put another way, how do you want to work on your clusters? Ignore the marketing aspects and what people are telling you in terms of how you want to work. How do you really want to work? We have been doing the web based interface for a while, and it works well. Is this the approach you want? Part of this is desktop direction. Are you going to stick with windows? Are you moving to Linux to reduce costs, and increase security? Solaris? OSX? How do you want to interact with your computing systems? We ask our customers this all the time, but as it seems we have .. a few … readers, it might be nice to see some feedback on this.