The Cluster Agenda Initiative
The cluster community needs to be pull together and connect the dots. It’s a join or die kind of thing.
Thursday, March 30th, 2006
Tell me: What is the biggest issue facing cluster computing today?
I certainly cannot say. Sure, I have my own opinion and have a long list of things I want to see happen, but what’s important to me may not be of critical importance to you.
Assessing needs — what venture capitalists love to call “finding pain points” — is usually the job of marketing: Discover what customers want (what’s” ailing” them), build it, and then sell it. The problem with clusters, though, is that assessing market needs is a hard thing to do. Because clusters reach customers through a variety of channels, it’s hard to find the customers and ask them what hurts. At the recent Supercomputing 2005 conference in Seattle, IDC coined the term “dark clusters”. Like the “dark matter” proposed by some physicists, dark clusters cannot be seen or measured using conventional methods, yet their existence has an effect, nonetheless.
Enumerating needs is one problem, but a larger problem is one of identity. How is the cluster community going to grow and flourish if it can’t answer two simple questions: “Where are we?” and “Where we are going?” I constantly ask myself these questions and I find there’s no easy answer, yet clear conception and vision is vitally important to the vitality of the existing community and critically important if the community is to expand — that is, if clusters are to find new customers.
