[Chicago] MPI in Python?

[Michael Tobis]

In high-performance scientific computing MPI is the standard solution
for distributed memory systems.

I had understood OpenMP to be a solution for shared memory parallelism
of certain sorts.  Look at it carefully to see if your programming
model matches it; my guess is that for most on this list it won't even
do that.

If there is a **distributed memory** version of OpenMP, it would seem
to be more of a toy than a real solution. Maybe it's useful for
porting existing OpenMP work to distributed memory?

That's consistent with what Massimo said. Massimo said nothing about
not using MPI.  Your summary seems wrong.

I think you want to build a threadlike environment on top of MPI on
top of ethernet or high performance switches. That seems plausible and
useful. You could even build duck-typed threadlike objects.

As Mike S said, you can also build MPI on top of threads. That's a
different prospect. (If you succeed in your mission you could build
threads on top of MPI and implement MPI with threads as a stunt or a
test.)

mt

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 2:15 PM,  <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>     Massimo> Is the CPU don't share the same RAM threading is not an option
>     Massimo> unless you use OpenMP, which emulates shared memory but it is
>     Massimo> very slow compared with MPI. Nobody uses it anymore.
>
>     Skip> So MPI means "Message Passing Interface" where the messages must
>     Skip> be passed via shared memory?  *sigh* If so, I'll look elsewhere
>     Skip> for solutions.
>
>     Mike> MPI means "Message Passing Interface" where you shouldn't have to
>     Mike> worry about the protocol used.  MPI will transparently use shared
>     Mike> memory, pthreads, some other ipc mechanism, or sockets based on
>     Mike> the configuration when you built the MPI library and/or what is
>     Mike> the best supported mechanism on your operating system.
>
>  So I obviously misunderstood what Massimo wrote.  What did he mean?  I
>  interpreted his statement as meaning you can't use MPI without a shared
>  memory architecture unless you are using OpenMP which nobody uses anymore.
>
>
>
>  Skip
>
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