Sun Microsystems high-performance research software project

[Torbjorn Granlund]

John Ravella <johnr at astuteresearch.com> writes:

  The Sun engineers assigned to this project are committed to work
  within the communities guidelines so contributed code would serve
  all supported platforms--they they are interested in maximizing
  performance on Sun, but I don't believe they plan contributing
  Sun-only code.

Ah, we should not be surprised if some Sun developed PowerPC and
Itanium assembly improvements for GMP pops up?  :-)

(For those that don't know: GMP's speed depends to a large degree on
processor specific assembly code.)

  Although I cannot speak for Sun's business plans, they have expressed
  interest in hosting a select number of these applications in their
  SunGrid hosting centers and providing compute power back to the
  research user communities--your users.
  
Our users will be happy.

But your statement might be based in a misunderstanding.  GMP is not
"a corporate product" of any company, such as the company that hosts
this mailing list.  There is no company that will benefit from a
computer vendor project on making some GMP improvements.

I am migrating the GMP project away from the swox.se domain--the web
site has already moved to http://gmplib.org/ and the mailing lists
will move soon.  The idea is to de-associate GMP from Swox and thus
avoid misunderstanding.

If Sun has plans for making GMP more useful for their benefit, it will
not necessarily help the GNU project's GMP library.  I know some Free
Software projects have maintainers that are in academia, with funding
in place and plenty of time for accepting external patches.  Other
projects, GNU/Linux is a good example, are partially funded by support
contracts, which are an incentive for integration of external patches.
Neither is is the case for GMP.  There are no already paid for
developer resources that can take care of corporate GMP patches.

-- 
Torbjörn