[Boost-users] Boost::MPI and/or Boost::Serialize on exotic platform

From: Joel FALCOU (joel.falcou_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-04-12 06:06:30

Dear members,

I'm currently developping some code for automatically
deploy code onto various parallel architecure and stumbled
upon the following design problem.

I need to be able to send an arbitrary complex data structure
(or array of data srtuctre) through some parallel communications 
services. As my tools aims for simplicity of use, I use a programming 
model in which all transfered data are marshalled into a some 
serializable form. Using boost::MPI allowed me to use Boost::serialize 
to ake care of this problems, solving it for the classic MIMD cluster 
platform. I managed to adapt this for multi-core/multi-processor by 
using some concurrent queue to simulate message passing interface 
between threads.

My next problem is to port this tools onto the Cell Processor. On one 
hand, i got all the DMA mumbo-jumbo cleared out into a tight template 
library that make them MPI call. Now my question is the following.

Considering I can't use STL or any compiled boost library on the Cell 
SPEs due to memory constraints, which is the best solution to use or 
reuse boost:mpi or boost:serialize to be able to build a function that 
take a serializable class, marshall it into a raw byte array so I can 
pass it to my DMA transfer functions ? Is there any internal of either 
boost::mpi or serialization that can be accessed and used ?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Joel FALCOU
Research Engineer @ Institut d'Electronique Fondamentale
Université PARIS SUD XI
France