Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 19 September 98

Foil 3 MPI Overview -- Comparison with HPF -- I

From MPI Message Passing Interface Computational Science for Simulations -- Fall Semester 1998. by Geoffrey C. Fox, Nancy McCracken
1 MPI collected ideas from many previous message passing systems and put them into a "standard" so we could write portable (runs on all current machines) and scalable (runs on future machines we can think of) parallel software
2 MPI plays the same role to message passing systems that HPF does to data parallel languages
  • BUT whereas MPI has essentially all one could want -- as message passing is "fully understood"
  • HPF and related technologies will still evolve as there are many unsolved data parallel compiler issues
    • e.g. HPC++ -- the C++ version of HPF has important differences
    • and there is no data parallel version of C due to pointers (there is a C* language which has restrictions)
    • HPJava is our new idea but again not same as HPF or HPC++
  • whereas MPI is fine with Fortran C or C++ and even Java
in Table To:

© Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Sun Apr 11 1999