[Info-vax] OT: Intel dusts off old supercomputing technology

[John Smith (not the one @ HP)]

"Neil Rieck" <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> wrote in message 
news:959708b2-df3f-4687-8ea4-769a056ef46a at f18g2000vbf.googlegroups.com...
On Dec 30, 3:50 am, SMS <sms.antin... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> > pos wrote:
> > >http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/folding_at_home.html
>
> > > - the reason the folding software will not run on IA64 or alpha is?
>
> > Apparently Folding at home is not supported on VMS.
>
> > (SETI at home is supported on VMS - or at least was at one point
> > in time)
>
> Years ago, yes. When they switched over to BOINC
> (2005), things got difficult. On Alpha, the C++ standard library
> IOStreams was unsuitable, as it demanded "the default
> floating-point format for each platform: G_FLOAT on Alpha
> systems", while BOINC expected IEEE. Then, as I recall,
> it expected to use the UNIX-like shmem() functions, which
> were not part of the C RTL in 2006 on Alpha or IA64.
>
> So, after running into a few walls, I moved on to other
> ways to waste my time.
>
> I assume that BOINC is popular with the various at home
> projects, so without the required infrastructure, VMS has
> probably gone invisible there (again).

Even though IBM makes research system (like BlueGene/L and RoadRunner)
for sale to governments and universities, they also provide free
"community computing" research software to customers using their large
and small systems. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_community_grid
for more details). I realize that companies are profit-driven
organizations but can't help thinking that IBM is writing off these
costs as an advertising expense then will eventually take (partial/
full) credit for solving some big problems (Look at all the mileage
they got from DeepThought competing with Garry Kasparov). So where is
HP in all this?



Where's HP?
Maybe they'll donate the ink to print the final report.