Supporting the GMP project

Do you think the enterprise you work for should contribute back some of the profits the enterprise is making from GMP? You recognize that GMP, as an important HPC library, is driving hardware sales, and that GMP makes your hardware look good?

You are not alone, the GMP project has been contacted countless times by people like you. There is hardly any hardware enterprise that has not promised to support GMP with hardware and/or funding. But somewhat surprisingly, no hardware company has ever actually supported GMP in the end.

The GMP project has spent very much time speaking with hardware companies. Initial contacts with promises of support are encouraging, and as more and more people in the enterprise get involved the reiterated promises appear more reliable. We need to take part in long email discussions and sometimes also telephone meetings. Promises of support continue, and more meetings and more email exchanges take place.

In no case has any support actually materialized. Not once. We had gotten claims from some of the absolutely largest companies that they have written checks for specific sums of money, or that hardware has been shipped. But not once has anything arrived to us! No, things are not lost in transit, they are never actually sent!

The GMP project has been involved in perhaps 15 such very concrete discussions. Only in a few cases, we dropped out of the discussions, after having been asked to spend too much time on meetings, or after repeated false claims of shipments. Our patience have become worse with time, admittedly.

So what is happening? Why do the hardware enterprises behave like this? We really have no idea. Something stops the support in the end. It is probably mostly due to bureaucracy.

OK, you still think the company you work for should contribute to the GMP project? Do not expect the GMP project to become too enthusiastic about any support offers, given our past experience. We will not be able to participate in long discussions with representatives from your company.

Here are things to think about:

1. Please work internally until you get a pretty solid go-ahead from somebody authorized to make such decisions, before you get in touch with us.
2. If you want to send hardware for the GMP development, testing, and benchmarking, it must be a complete 1U or 2U rack mountable system, and include rails. Your company must also not make any restrictions on publications of GMP benchmark result obtained on the hardware. We will not sign any temporary NDAs.
3. Your company will have to pay import duties and taxes for any system you ship to us. Our test environment is located at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
4. We reserve the right to turn down your offer for hardware system, even if you might be offering a truly wonderful system. We will do that if we already have satisfactory access to the offered hardware, or if we have no time setting up another system at the time.
5. Even if we accept an offered computer system, we cannot promise to do any GMP development on the system. If you want GMP development for a fee, you might try asking on the public mailing list gmp-devel@gmplib.org.
6. We're not somehow making money from GMP or from donated hardware. Don't treat us as if we do. You are not making any service to us by offering us a system. If we can afford taking the time to integrate your system in our environment, then we and you are making a service to the huge GMP user community.

These polices are intended to benefit GMP development. We have lost at least 6 months over the years talking to hardware enterprises, time which would have been better used to develop GMP instead.

Perhaps these polices disqualifies us for enterprise support? Well, tough. It cannot get worse, since much work for zero benefit is really the worst possible scenario.

What about GMP patches your company develops or have some 3rd party develop? Will we clean them up, test them and integrate them into GMP? We might, or we might not. It is really our decision, and any offer for "free" hardware will not affect such decisions. If the patches are good, and if you take care of the needed copyright assignment paperwork, the likelyhood is higher that we will volunteer the time needed to apply the patches. But just like most of you do not do a lot of volunteer work for enterprises, you cannot expect us to do that either.

Sincerely
The GMP team