Re: parallelism!

[Scott Christley]

At 01:36 PM 4/13/97 -0600, address@hidden wrote:

>  At the moment, we are looking at something like building 
>an MPI-Objc library, where we wrap up MPI calls in swarm library 
>objects. We are also leaning strongly to working within some
>existing distributed object standard, such as that used
>by NeXT-Step. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, and we'd
>like to stay within reasonable distance of existing
>standards....

I'm trying but I haven't quite figured out what MPI stands for (multiple
process interface?).

Its also unclear to me, probably because my understanding of Swarm is
minimal now, but what type of parallel models are you allowing/using?

Local memory and message passing with no shared memory?

What network topologies are you expecting to support?

What type of memory models are you expecting to support?

Is the user expected to perform the problem decomposition and Swarm will
handle the distribution; is the user expected to specify both, or is Swarm
going to be able to perform both based upon common model "skeletons" or types.

I also see a different viewpoint when you discuss parallelism-1; which is
parallelism not of a single program, but of running many concurrent
simulations.  Presumably this is important because a researcher may perform
1000 runs of a simulation and perform some statistical analysis on the results.

Scott


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