MPI (was Re: BIG libraries with self-compiled version)

[Michael Creel]

John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 29-Sep-2005, Michael Creel wrote:
>
> | Perhaps it would be a good idea to incorporate MPITB into Octave. It is 
> | licensed GPL, and Javier Fernández, the developer, has indicated that he 
> | wouldn't mind putting it into octave-forge, if he could get help making 
> | it build using the o-f system. I expect that the same would go for 
> | direct incorporation into Octave. MPITB just makes mpi functions 
> | available to Octave. If they're not used, Octave functions as normal - 
> | there's no need to do MPI_Init at the outset. So its presence shouldn't 
> | bother anyone, and it could also be built optionally. With dual core 
> | systems ready to hit the mass market, it would be a shame if Octave were 
> | to use only half the computing power of such machines.
>
> I think it would be great to have MPI functions for Octave.  But I
> think the right place for that is in an external package rather than
> with Octave itself.  I hope to be able to do something soon with the
> package system that Soren Hauberg has been working on, so we can
> actually start to remove some things from Octave and put them in extra
> packages rather than throwing everything in to the core of Octave.
>
> jwe
>
>
>  
This may be true, but if really fundamental parts of octave could be 
parallelized, like for example matrix multiplications, or sorts, then it 
might be good to do it inside octave, or at least to have the option 
there.  Unless all of that were done in .oct files. But I think that 
trying to figure out how to let end users take advantage of multi core 
cpus will be worth thinking about, pretty soon now. Cheers, M.



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