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
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
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

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