On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 06:04:36PM -0400, Jeff Squyres wrote:

On Sep 12, 2008, at 5:59 PM, Greg Lindahl wrote:

...

Sure, you're welcome to ask. But predicting the future is hard, and even package maintainers probably aren't very good at it, i.e. someone who's never considered a binary distribution due to MPI issues may well not leap at the possibility today, but might in a year or two. Instead, you might look at the rapid growth of non-MPI scientific programs being distributed as binaries, and project from there.

Can you cite some of these?

http://informatics.umdnj.edu/BioRPMs/ is an example of a group that's doing binary distrbiutions. I think these are all non-MPI. 36 bioinformatics apps 11 molecular modeling apps 29 engineering apps I know that Debian has a ton of scientific apps in it, too, including some MPI apps linked only to their favorite MPI implementation. The reason all this binary distributing is going on is that end-users don't want to compile things, or even rebuild srpms. -- greg