Re: mpi

[Matt Newville <newville@cars.uchicago.edu>]

Hi Jim, Everyone,

I hope I'm not sounding too pissed off at any one person on this
list.  I think there are serious problems with the Feff Project,
but I wouldn't be wasting my (and your) time if I didn't want it
to succeed.  I'll try to refrain from ranting too much.

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, James S Sims wrote:
> >
> > MPICH is non-GPL open-source, so why not include it with the Feff
> > distribution and automatically build it for everyone who can use it?
>
> Because it doesn't include IMPI -
>
> http://impi.nist.gov/
>
> If you insist on public domain, I'd choose lam because it does include
> IMPI. But I vastly prefer vendor implementations, where they are available.
> I use SGI's (IRIX) version that comes with the box, so to speak, the same with an
> IBM SP2 (like gseaborg.nersc.gov). That's really why there was so much work put
> into creating a standard for interoperability, and so far implementations in
> LAM (public domain), HP/MPI for HP-UX, and MPI/Pro for Windows. See
>
> http://www.lsc.nd.edu/research/impi/

I know nothing about parallelization software and certainly not the
details of how MPI differs from IMPI.  I have no problem with vendor
software, but it's hard to count vendor software as "portable",
which has traditionally been a priority for Feff.  Using open source
software makes portability easier.

It looks to me like lam uses a BSD-like license, and even has an
impi server associated with it.  Is this server any good?  If lam
uses a BSD-style license, then one option might be to bundle it with
Feff, test whether a 'vendor-supplied' IMPI library is available on
a system, and, if not, install and use lam (and the server if
necessary???).  That way everyone could get at least a minimal IMPI
implementation.  I don't know enough about it to know if that's
really possible:  Does that seem reasonable to you?

Again, I'm perfectly willing to hear other ideas and opinions.  If
Feff is going to distribute code that used MPI, it would be nice if
there were automated ways to install and use it.  I would not want
to assume that Feff users know anything about parallelization.

--Matt, Feff Novice