Re: [boost] [Review Request] Message Passing Interface (MPI) Library

From: Noel Belcourt (kbelco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-06-29 00:47:31

On Jun 28, 2006, at 9:29 PM, Dean Michael Berris wrote:

> On 6/29/06, Doug Gregor <doug.gregor_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> I am requesting a formal review for a Boost library that provides 
>> modern C++
>> bindings for the Message Passing Interface (MPI).
>>
>
> I've used MPI before, albeit in C, and I have a few questions (before
> even reading the documentation fully). I am also very excited with the
> prospect of actually having an MPI bindings implementation for C++ in
> boost.

Me too.

> I see that this requires any one of three MPI implementations -- and
> there are a lot of differences between these implementations
> internally and architecturally. There's also the question of compiler
> compliance, and platform dependence -- although I haven't seen the
> code yet, my question would be more of pragmatic in the sense that it
> maintain a common STL-like interface without breaking the
> distributed/parallel computing frame.

Since the library is based on the published MPI 1.1 standard, there 
should be minimal portability issues provided you're using a conforming 
MPI implementation.

As a quick check, I just tried it on our Sun-Fire cluster with Sun's 
HPC MPI and it worked okay.  Just had to setup

setenv MPICXX /opt/SUNWhpc/bin/mpCC
setenv MPIRUN /opt/SUNWhpc/bin/mprun
setenv MPIBUILD "<include>/opt/SUNWhpc/include <define>_MPIPP_H"

The define is to skip inclusion of the MPI C++ headers.

Thanks for the library Doug.  I like the looks of your all_reduce, it 
looks very similar to what we did.

-- Noel Belcourt