[Pympi-users] What I like about pyMPI is

[Julian C. <rjc...@cs...>]

[Pat Millers'] current priority list is:

1) Direct [non-pickled] communication for Numarray and Numeric arrays
2) A "remote-communicating-objects" layer [one-sided, interrupting
    remote method calls]
3) SIMD support
---------------

I already sent this reply to Pat at the admin list. For the record, what I
like about pyMPI is:

1. The close correlation between the MPI calls and the python equivalents.
It's not particularly oo or pythonic, but it makes life simple. It means you
don't have to re-learn the api when switching from C MPI to pyMPI. This
would be a big selling point to a current C MPI user. You just have to point
out how much faster they can prototype with pyMPI.
2. The interactive ability is great. You never get the code right first
time, so being able to see, investigate and correct the intermediate
functions, as you go, is very productive. Also research is exploratory by
nature. You get an answer, think about it, then try something else.
3. General ease of use. I think if people saw how easy it is to go parallel
in pyMPI, it would be a big hit.

In terms of priorities, I don't disagree with the above (Pat Millers')
priority list, since they will probably increase throughput substantially.
What I think is would help in the short term is:
1. A release that can be considered the current stable release. This is
important, because that's the one that new users should get pointed to. This
might be difficult since it involves maintaining 2 branches of the code. (he
did say that a stable release is agood idea, to match python 2.4)
2. A documentation effort over the next 3-6 months. We could all help here
by coming up with examples from our own fields. I actually work in Finance,
so the examples I come up with, would likely be very different from those of
other current users. I noticed that mocapy exists. That should be
highlighted too.
3. Get everyone to write in and talk about what what they are doing. Not
only is it interesting, but a vibrant user community attracts new users like
a magnet.

I actually had pyMPI running at home, but I recently moved house, so I need
to set up my network again. I was on version 2.1b4. I'm getting pyMPI
properly installed at work (see other post), where we have 100+
sparcstations and a bunch of servers. We also use [in-house developed]
parallel processing at work in our product for speeding up scenario analysis
of derivative trades.

regards

Julian Cook