Re: Octave Interpreter

[Stefan Seefeld]

On 2014-10-06 08:28, c. wrote:
> On 6 Oct 2014, at 14:07, Stefan Seefeld <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Right. I think pure data parallelism as done with MPI isn't very
>> practical for an interpreter, as lots of commands typed interactively
>> aren't meant to be executed in parallel. On the other hand, spawning
>> other processes for a single parallel operation may not be practical
>> either. Perhaps something like a thread-pool pattern would work, where
>> processes are spawned upfront, but are kept in stand-by mode until a
>> parallel region is entered where data (and computation) is allocated to
>> them.
> I have been interested in this project myself, 
> what I thought of is something like:
>
>   [out1, out2] = mpirun (numproc, function, input1, input2, ...)
>
> to run an MPI based Octave function from the Octave prompt.
> Would that suit you as well?

That might be a good starting point, though I think ultimately we need
something more expressive and robust. I'm notably thinking of an
architecture for managing multiple "engine" processes that run octave
instances but that read their input not from an interactive tty, but
some socket. This would allow multiple engines to be orchestrated via an
MPI Communicator (doing data-parallel computation), or using some other
paradigm such as task-level parallelism.


I think the ipython project has very useful material for this:
http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/2/parallel/parallel_intro.html

    Stefan

-- 

      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...