[Swift-devel] user guide work

[Mihael Hategan]

On Tue, 2015-05-19 at 09:25 -0500, Lorenzo Pesce wrote:
> I will throw in my useless 2 cents. I have been part of five or six swift based projects
> all involving what I would call large computations (at least a million core hours, usually tens of terabytes of data).
> 
> In my experience:
> 1) The basic variables are all we ever needed.
> 2) The basic control loops is all we ever needed even if some more complex ones could have been handy (they just weren’t there when I started).
> 3) All the file system trickeries known to the devil and his friends are absolutely necessary. I never found a project that didn’t end up chocking on its data.
> 4) All the tricks for dealing intelligently with staging of data and code and “offloading” control are essential to avoid the hatred of the system administrators and other users.
> 5) A very clear understanding of where Swift is robust and where it
> isn’t are very important because nobody likes to have a 300 node run
> come crashing down on you creating an infestation of zombies that
> eventually might have forced Beagle’s admin to reboot. This is not
> criticism, I participated heavily in writing that script, so I am on
> the accused team. 

Thanks! That is very useful. Do you have specific feedback on the
documentation? Such as #1 and #2 most annoying things about it?

> 
> I can try to be more helpful, if you want me to. 
> 
> I have worked on a number of parallel projects, where essentially the
> same workflow was implemented with and without swift and both teams
> played to win. That is one paper I plan to write some day…

Wait, who won? :)

Mihael