>Well, flawed in the sense of "hard to fund...". I had to drop pmemd
>because I couldn't work on it full time without funding, and really
>needed to work on it a fair bit to keep it moving. I would argue that
>you can get better software from a smaller team, and the model of having
>somebody actualize the final code is not all that flawed,
Agreed the real issue is one of funding and I really don't think people
'get' the true cost of software these days. Even the funding agencies are
ultimately clueless. Take the AMBER GPU port for example (which is
ultimately a VERY small team). In total we have had direct funding from
NSF as follows (considering just direct):
SI2-SSE I
SI2-SSE II
On top of this we have managed to leverage approximately:
AMBER royalties
NVIDIA
Amazon
Adding in things like UC Lab funding which got it started in the first
place and TeraGrid / XSEDE / Exxact contributions in kind and we are
easily looking
And that's cheap at half the price. So we should all be grateful to all
the people we have managed to leverage support from for the fact that we
are even remotely competitive. Without this AMBER in terms of being used
for MD, in my opinion, would be in the process of bleeding to death right
now. Instead we currently have the fastest MD engine on commodity hardware
and we should be thankful to those mentioned above for this.
The key is how we keep it funded moving forward.
Seriously, to survive moving forward we either need a large center grant -
where a substantial fraction of the funds are used for real coding
efforts, or we need to critically extend our reach into industry. Relying
on smaller and smaller grants from funding agencies where the odd spare $
on the side funds the software development is not going to cut it for much
longer.
All the best
Ross
/\
\/
|\oss Walker
---------------------------------------------------------
| Associate Research Professor |
| San Diego Supercomputer Center |
| Adjunct Associate Professor |
| Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry |
| University of California San Diego |
| NVIDIA Fellow |
|
http://www.rosswalker.co.uk |
http://www.wmd-lab.org |
| Tel: +1 858 822 0854 | EMail:- ross.rosswalker.co.uk |
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Received on Mon Feb 17 2014 - 23:00:04 PST
