__/ [ Linonut ] on Monday 18 September 2006 21:50 \__
> SAS ported JMP to Linux in 2003, and now they've ported it to 64-bit
> Linux. SAS seems proud to link to this article, which appear in the
> September 2006 Linux Journal:
>
> http://www.jmp.com/about/news/linux_journal/index.shtml
>
> "With JMP's new multithreaded architecture running on a 64-bit dual
> processor, experimental designs that once took several days to
> compute can now be calculated in minutes. And, problems that were
> impossible only last year can now be handled in minutes with 64-bit
> Linux JMP."
>
> I like this part particularly:
>
> "Nelson observed that porting JMP to 64 bits went smoothly. "The only
> issue was locating the few places where our code made assumptions
> about 32-bit word and pointer sizes", says Nelson. "There were no
> surprises from the tools used for the port, either. Much of the ease
> in porting is due to the long heritage on 64-bit UNIX platforms of
> the open-source tools we used."
>
> "The GNU Compiler Collection, gdb, Emacs and the rest of the
> toolchain performed as expected on the x86_64 architecture", says
> Nelson."
>
> Good on ya, GNU! Nice of ya to cooperate with a proprietary software
> outfit.
Opinion: proprietary scientific software is still non-'scientific' in its
spirit. It often makes the user depend on very expensive licenses in order
to do some analysis or run some simple code. It also hides the way it
operates; black boxes are means of discouraging education through curiosity.
That, for example, is why projects like Octave emerge, which mimic the
behaviour of MATLAB and other scientific computing packages/languages.
Still, it's nice to see that JMP JUMPS into the next generation of computing
with Linux _and_ 64-bit architectures. Meanwhile, on the other side, some
software runs on bug-ridden platforms that only operate properly with a
32-bit instruction set. It can make a tremendous difference in the context
of scientific computing where runtimes can extend to hours, days, even
months (without user intervention). Stability and efficiency become
important factors. It is no surprise that many rendering farms, for example,
have moved (and are still moving) to Linux.
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