[Swift-devel] LQCD meeting at Fermi

[Veronika Nefedova]

Ian,

they seem like quite a strange bunch to me. Here is my experience  
with them.

When I first met them back in April, they gave us their code and  
explained what they want to achieve. Within couple of weeks I sent  
them the working code for their workflow. It took them another couple  
of weeks to start testing it (and it worked for them as well). After  
that they said that they would modify that workflow to suit their  
production needs. And they've disappeared for another 3 weeks. During  
those 3 weeks I sent them numerous emails offering my help * 
(basically saying - "give me your production code and data and I'll  
make it work for you") - but it was no response. Till last week when  
they sent us their code (not working) and questions.
The code is very close to be in working condition, unfortunately they  
were "inventing the wheel" instead of asking us for help (like they  
spent quite a time trying to do string concatenation without using  
the @strcat function). They also did a hack for random number  
generator instead of using the function that I sent them (which is  
much easier and cleaner way).

So my impression was that they wanted to figure our swift on their  
own (which is good) but without our help (which is bad). But now i  
think they are ready for us to step in. They mentioned something  
about 2 months timeframe when they need to have the things running...

Nika

On Jun 1, 2007, at 5:50 PM, Ian Foster wrote:

> Ben:
>
> The question for me is whether they are invested, or just playing  
> with it and finding things that are "wrong" not because they are  
> serious problems but rather as excuses for them not to do more.  
> (I've often experienced that.)
>
> So I want to know if they are using it for real work or not. So far  
> things don't look so good--as I understand things, they don't have  
> a working program after what mus be 4-5 months talking to us (?).
>
> Ian
>
> Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Clifford <benc at hawaga.org.uk>
> Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2007 22:38:42
> To:Ian Foster <foster at mcs.anl.gov>
> Cc:Veronika Nefedova <nefedova at mcs.anl.gov>, swift- 
> devel at ci.uchicago.edu
> Subject: Re: [Swift-devel] LQCD meeting at Fermi
>
>
>
> On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Ian Foster wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the summary. I am very eager to see some results for  
>> executions of
>> real application problems. Did they agree to a timeline for that?
>
> Would also be good to have some definition of what is an acceptable  
> 'real
> application problem', in terms of which programs are to be run on  
> which
> datasets on what sized resource.
>
> -- 
>