[petsc-dev] Adding support memkind allocators in PETSc

[Barry Smith]

> On Jun 3, 2015, at 9:00 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
> 
> Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
>> Yes, Jed has already transformed himself into a cranky old conservative PETSc developer
> 
> Is disinclination to spend effort on something with negative expected
> value "conservative"?
> 
> Actually, it's almost the definition.  But if you spend time on
> legitimately high-risk things, you should expect that with high
> probability, they will be a failure.  Thus, it's essential to be
> prepared to declare failure rather than lobbying for success (e.g.,
> merging) without conclusive data.  Declaring failure in this case may be
> hard without access to the hardware to be able to push all the design
> corners.
  
  Richard has access to the hardware and is not going to "lie to us" that "oh it helps so much" because he knows that you will test it yourself and see that he is lying. So should we support some 3rd party that wants money (from ASCR) to prove (in a publication) that using memkind is a good idea? Absolutely not. But should we support Richard to try some experiments, I don't see the downside.