[boost] [Review][MPI] Boost.MPI review begins

From: Jeremy Graham Siek (jsiek_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-09-06 15:16:06

Hi All,

The view of the Boost.MPI (for Message Passing Interface) begins
today, Sept. 6 and continues through Sept. 15.

Description:

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standard interface for message
passing in high-performance parallel applications. It defines a library
interface, available from C, Fortran, and C++, for which there are many
MPI implementations. Although there exist C++ bindings for MPI, they
offer little functionality over the C bindings. The Boost.MPI library
provides an alternative C++ interface to MPI that better supports
modern C++ development styles, including complete support for user- 
defined
data types and C++ Standard Library types, arbitrary function objects  
for
colective algorithms, and the use of modern C++ library techniques to
maintain maximal efficiency. As an example, one can concatenate the
std::strings stored on each processor with a single reduce call and
the function object std::plus<std::string>. However, if the call to
reduce is merely computing the sum of integers, the implementation
transforms into the appropriate call to MPI_Reduce. For more information
about the design of Boost.MPI, see our design philosophy.

The review tarball is here:

     http://www.generic-programming.org/~dgregor/boost.mpi/boost- 
mpi-20060906.tgz

Online documentation is available here:

     http://www.generic-programming.org/~dgregor/boost.mpi/libs/ 
parallel/doc/html/

PDF documentation is available here:

     http://www.generic-programming.org/~dgregor/boost.mpi/mpi.pdf

Review questions
================

Please always explicitly state in your review, whether you think the
library should be accepted into Boost.

You might want to comment on the following questions:

- What is your evaluation of the design?
- What is your evaluation of the implementation?
- What is your evaluation of the documentation?
- What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?
- Did you try to use the library? With what compiler?
   Did you have any problems?
- How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A
   quick reading? In-depth study?
- Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

Cheers,
Jeremy

__________________________________
Jeremy Siek <siek_at_[hidden]>
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Colorado at Boulder