Douglas Roberts wrote: > Making the transition from a serial application to a parallel version > is a process that requires a fair degree of formalism, if the goal of > the project is to produce a production-ready version that can handle > the larger problems. Hmm, there may be a disconnect here between a culture of software developers and computer scientists who consider the engineering of toolkits as that formalism, conducted some distance from the activity of use, and a culture of scientists who don't have any interest in software systems but want to get certain experiments performed.
To me, there is an interesting and useful problem of the finding the nicest to use, highest performance, most versatile hardware/software system for ABM (and other scientific/analytical applications) Using such candidate programs for a while gives ideas for shortcomings in the design and implementation, but when I use such an instrument I don't really think about changing it except to fix bugs. The tool development itself is open-ended and both a means and an end. No ABM system should not expose MPI to model code, yet the system should have a clear model for concurrency. Many big Science codes directly expose these low-level mechanisms to users. Thus in that community is a culture of technological curmudgeons! ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
