[Matrix-SIG] Parallel matrix solvers

[Andrew P. Mullhaupt]

-----Original Message-----
From: Zow Terry Brugger <zow@pensive.llnl.gov>
To: matrix-sig@python.org <matrix-sig@python.org>
Date: Friday, March 19, 1999 3:25 PM
Subject: [Matrix-SIG] Parallel matrix solvers


>Good day,
> Our group is looking at using Python for large matrix solves, however it
has
>come to my attention that the current NumPy implementation is serial. Has
>anyone done any work on using MPI and/or threads to parallelize huge matrix
>operations?

That's a pretty specific kind of parallelization which isn't really that
good, but a lot of work has been done on libraries to provide this sort of
parallelism in libraries for numerical linear algebra (see www.netlib.org).
You could extend Numerical Python to call these functions.

The reason that message passing is a particularly lackluster form of
parallelism is mainly that it forces the programmer to write all the
communication code, and this has normally resulted in code which is good for
a few architectures but not so good for the most available - symmetric
multiprocessors.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt