Re: [Pympi-users] E-cell and parallel pympi extensions

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

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 Sorry for the delay in replying. Pat Miller is better qualified to 
answer this question, but I will try to outline the answer.

pympi is itself a special version of the python interpreter that is mpi 
aware. Most users are specifically using pympi, because it allows them 
to AVOID having to write parallel programs in a low level language like C.

pympi is mpi aware, because it initialises the MPI processes at startup. 
You access them through the loading of the mpi module with this statement:
 >>> import mpi

There is an example of the other approach, where the mpi calls are made 
in a compiled module here:

http://pympi.sourceforge.net/examples.html

See the simple extension example. This is actually a python extension 
that also includes mpi calls using the MPI C api directly without going 
through python, for instance it uses the C api to get it's own rank:

MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD,&rank);


I have not used the C api myself from pympi, for the reasons I stated at 
the beginning:

regards

Julian Cook