On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 07:48:24PM -0400, Jeff Squyres wrote:

If they're not MPI apps, they don't seem relevant to this discussion, do they? :-)

I mentioned this a couple of emails ago, but I'll repeat myself: Because few people distributing MPI apps have even considered making a binary distribution due to the lack of an ABI, it might make more sense to look at how many non-MPI scientific apps are distributed as binaries to get an idea of how much demand for an MPI ABI might be in the future.

...

I know that Debian has a ton of scientific apps in it, too, including some MPI apps linked only to their favorite MPI implementation.

Can you get these maintainers to say that they want / will use an MPI ABI?

You are welcome to contantact them. I don't know them.

...

The reason all this binary distributing is going on is that end-users don't want to compile things, or even rebuild srpms.

So you're saying: "trust me." :-)

No, I am not. You are free to directly contact the BioRPMs people and Debian people to find out their motivation. I was just giving you some clues as to where to find them. -- greg