Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi,comp.parallel.pvm From: Christophe Koudella Subject: Re: Why explicit message passing?? Organization: Ens Lyon Date: Fri, 03 Apr 1998 16:46:11 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <3524F633.41C6@ens-lyon.fr> Hy, I am trying rather hard to follow this thread, which I find really interesting. The problem is that I am trained as a physicist, have some experience in message passing, but do not understand most of your jargon like OO,functional, distributed shared mem, etc... Can anybody point to a synthetic document explaining all these terms or give some explanations, thank you, Christophe Kamran Karimi wrote: > > Hi Everybody, > > Could I ask the people in this newsgroup why they use (or are interested in) > explicit message passing systems and continue to use FORTRAN? What are the > reasons of using PVM or MPI instead of distributed shared memory or > distributed object oriented systems? > > Explicit message passing belongs to the stone age of the computer science. > It is analogous to using machine language, and writing one's own hardware > drivers instead of relying on general purpose operating systems. Most other > branches of computer science have long left those times, but some distributed > programmers seems to enjoy living in the past. > > The trend in software has been to simplify the development work, even if > that means sacrifycing some efficiency (high level languages produce bigger > and slower code, and operating systems do have overhead). But few care about > such things now. This has resulted in countless useful applications being > developed all over the world, by people who otherwise could not do it. Every > one has benefitted. > > Systems like PVM or MPI make it difficult for many people to enter the > distributed programming era. We should adapt new standards for distributed > programming, even if that means leaving a lot of legacy code behind. After > all if this had happened sooner, there would be less such code, and less > people would have spend their time learning to use them. > > Regards, > Kamran Karimi