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Unless we're imagining a universe in which the programmer is around to tweak their source code for every hardware platform It doesn't have to be the whole univ

by pvg 4y ago

Unless we're imagining a universe in which the programmer is around to tweak their source code for every hardware platform It doesn't have to be the whole universe just a region in which a particular kind of specialized scientific computing is done. I have not idea what this specific thing is good for but looking at it in through the lens of general purpose computing truisms probably misses more than it illuminates.

bee_rider 4y ago
There's some truth there, but I think it is actually flipped. Scientific computing codes generally stick around a while (or at least they might, or at least we hope they will), they are run on complicated platforms by motivated people. There's incentive to do run-time tuning, and there's value to making them general. On the other hand, you might have things like a videogame console, where the program is tuned for a particular platform. There's plenty of room there for programmer control I think (not sure though, that isn't my field -- in the Unity/Unreal era maybe they try and make things general? But I bet the programmer can exert great control if they want).
- pvg 4y ago
  Scientific computing codes generally stick around a while I don't think this is generally true and wasn't at all true in my limited exposure to scientific computing. There's lots of one-off, ad-hoc code that isn't building the next BLAS or whatever. The whole trope of 'scientists are terrible programmers' doesn't come from some universally prevalent incentive to write general, long-living code.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    Scientific computing is not scientists doing computing. Its weather simulation, CFD, and other engineering FEA software. Lots of it has been around for decades and may even be written in Fortran. Come to think of it, this may be targeted at scientists after all.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      It says it is for "high-performance scientific computing" though. Could actually be intended for scientists who happen to be writing programs and mislabeled though. But do they typically care about manual hardware tuning, the sort that this library claims to enable?
      - jltsiren 4y ago
        It's common among scientists who write low-level code. Also, the author of the library we are talking about is a physicist, and the library probably exists for a reason.

by pvg 4y ago

bee_rider 4y ago

There's some truth there, but I think it is actually flipped. Scientific computing codes generally stick around a while (or at least they might, or at least we hope they will), they are run on complicated platforms by motivated people. There's incentive to do run-time tuning, and there's value to making them general. On the other hand, you might have things like a videogame console, where the program is tuned for a particular platform. There's plenty of room there for programmer control I think (not sure though, that isn't my field -- in the Unity/Unreal era maybe they try and make things general? But I bet the programmer can exert great control if they want).

pvg 4y ago
Scientific computing codes generally stick around a while I don't think this is generally true and wasn't at all true in my limited exposure to scientific computing. There's lots of one-off, ad-hoc code that isn't building the next BLAS or whatever. The whole trope of 'scientists are terrible programmers' doesn't come from some universally prevalent incentive to write general, long-living code.
- phkahler 4y ago
  Scientific computing is not scientists doing computing. Its weather simulation, CFD, and other engineering FEA software. Lots of it has been around for decades and may even be written in Fortran. Come to think of it, this may be targeted at scientists after all.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It says it is for "high-performance scientific computing" though. Could actually be intended for scientists who happen to be writing programs and mislabeled though. But do they typically care about manual hardware tuning, the sort that this library claims to enable?
    - jltsiren 4y ago
      It's common among scientists who write low-level code. Also, the author of the library we are talking about is a physicist, and the library probably exists for a reason.