[Mpi-forum] MPI user survey - what purpose?

[Bronis R. de Supinski]

I agree 100% with Dick's statement that survey support
will not be a convincing arguement to move forward with
large (or, IMO, small) issues. At most, we might get a
few "Hey, we didn't think of that" ideas or issues out
of this survey. Anything further would be a mistake.

Feedback is useful but it must be filtered.


On Wed, 18 Nov 2009, Jeff Squyres wrote:

> Thanks all for the comments about the survey.  Apologies that I have
> not replied earlier; I have read all of the feedback and am making a
> final whack at the on-line survey right now.  I'm at SC09 this week
> and my email access is limited to extremely late in the evening and
> extremely early in the morning.
>
> It's hard to disagree with what has been said; I'm in complete
> agreement that surveys are very, very hard to do properly.  At the
> same time, perhaps it's just the optimist in me that feels like we
> need to try to get some feedback on the "big" issues.  We're making
> MPI-3 for what people want to do, right?
>
> I do tend to agree with Dick that some of the Big Complex Issue
> questions may be of limited value far all the reasons previously
> discussed.  Perhaps they should turn into general text box answers
> rather than a simple number evaluation -- that might give [slightly]
> more useful results by forcing the user to *say* something descriptive.
>
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2009, at 6:16 AM, Richard Treumann wrote:
>
> > I would like to hear exactly what the advocates of doing a survey
> > hope to gain from it.
> >
> > A survey about what people use MPI for today might give useful
> > information if the survey is well constructed. One that asks
> > questions about what they expect to want to do over the next decade
> > could conceivably give useful information though I think it would be
> > hard to construct well and hard to interpret.
> >
> > Asking questions about complex technical options by giving very
> > brief overviews, each crafted by a person who knows what answer they
> > want seems to have almost zero chance of giving useful feedback. At
> > most it gives the person with a particular agenda a way to argue
> > that his agenda has strong support. Of course, in most (or all)
> > cases, if the survey question had been crafted by a skeptic of that
> > agenda, the support would not be seen and the argument would be that
> > the public is clearly not on board.
> >
> > In reality neither question tells us how the community will respond
> > to the ultimate content of the MPI 3 standard. Responsible,
> > professional polling organization have highly trained specialists
> > crafting supposedly balanced questions and still freely confess that
> > a favorable response to question is not the same as genuine support
> > for the underlying issue.
> >
> > I, for one, will not give it much credence when somebody brings
> > forward a 20 page extension to the standard and says: "We must vote
> > this in because my 20 word question about it got 85% favorable."
> >
> > Dick
> >
> > Dick Treumann - MPI Team
> > IBM Systems & Technology Group
> > Dept X2ZA / MS P963 -- 2455 South Road -- Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
> > Tele (845) 433-7846 Fax (845) 433-8363
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>
>
> --
> Jeff Squyres
> jsquyres at cisco.com
>
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