{"id":4400,"date":"2012-07-10T10:25:09","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T09:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4400"},"modified":"2012-07-10T10:25:09","modified_gmt":"2012-07-10T09:25:09","slug":"when-software-licensing-cripples-scientific-throughput","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4400","title":{"rendered":"When software licensing cripples scientific throughput"},"content":{"rendered":"

I work for The University of Manchester where, among other things, I assist in the support of various high performance<\/a> and high throughput<\/a> computing systems.\u00a0 Exchanges such as the following are, sadly, becoming all too commonplace<\/p>\n

Researcher:<\/strong> “Hi, I have an embarrassingly parallel research problem that needs a lot of compute resource.\u00a0 Can you help?”<\/p>\n

Support: <\/strong>“Almost certainly, you could have access to our 2500 core Condor<\/a> pool or maybe our 2000 core HPC system or any number of smaller systems depending on the department you are in.\u00a0 Let’s meet to discuss your requirements in more detail”<\/p>\n

Researcher:<\/strong> “Sounds great.\u00a0 I am using [insert expensive commercial package here], could we install that on your systems?”<\/p>\n

Support: <\/strong>“Not unless you pay a HUGE amount of money because you’ll need dozens or maybe hundreds of licenses.\u00a0 The licenses will cost more than our machines!\u00a0 Could you use [insert open source equivalent here] instead?”<\/p>\n

Researcher: <\/strong>“A member of your team suggested that about 2 years ago but [insert expensive commercial package here] is easier to use, looks pretty and a single license didn’t seem all that expensive.\u00a0 It’ll take me ages to convert to [insert open source equivalent here].\u00a0 Instead of splitting the job up and spreading it around lots of machines, can’t I just run it on a faster machine?”<\/p>\n

Support: <\/strong>“Sorry but parallelism is the only real game in town when it comes to making stuff faster these days.\u00a0 I’m afraid that you’ll have to convert to [insert open source equivalent here], open your chequebook or wait until 2076 for your results to complete on your workstation.”<\/p>\n

The moral of the story is that if you want your compute to scale, you need to ensure that your licensing scales too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I work for The University of Manchester where, among other things, I assist in the support of various high performance and high throughput computing systems.\u00a0 Exchanges such as the following are, sadly, becoming all too commonplace Researcher: “Hi, I have an embarrassingly parallel research problem that needs a lot of compute resource.\u00a0 Can you help?” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,40,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-applications","category-free-software","category-open-source"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-18Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4401,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400\/revisions\/4401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}