Something for everybody
I know there are two distinct flavors to my readers: those who care about distributed grid application virtualization parallel computing in general, and those who read specifically to hear about the latest Digipede news. This post has a little something for everyone.
Bill McColl has a great post up over at Computing at Scale entitled "Domain-Specific Parallel Programming." His most important point: "(thirty years of research and funding) has gone into parallel supercomputing, an area that is in many ways the opposite of industrial and commercial computing." He then contrasts supercomputing programmers ("Ph.D. level scientists with deep experience of parallel software development") with developers in the commercial world ("have only a limited range of programming skills, and usually no experience whatsoever of parallelism").
He's absolutely correct--and the latter set needs access to powerful distributed computing just as much as the former.
On the Digipede front, I've just put up a couple of posts on the Digipede Community site specifically for developers using the Digipede Framework SDK: here's a list of the new features in version 2.1 of the SDK, and here's a little sample that uses some of the new API functionality.
Finally, for my social-networking-addicted-readers (both of you): I got totally annoyed at the criticism of Scoble's claim that Twitter beat the USGS with news of the earthquake. The lesson isn't "You should get earthquake news from Twitter because the USGS takes two minutes." The lesson is "There is an amazing new, very widespread information gathering and distributing network--wider and faster than anything that has ever existed." That is news, and it was worth trumpeting.
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