Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi,comp.parallel.pvm
From: Kamran Karimi <kamran@wallybox.cei.net>
Subject: Re: Why explicit message passing??
Organization: World Lynx, Inc.
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 17:54:27 +0000
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980408175039.12237A-100000@wallybox.cei.net>

Hi Alan,

Alan Williams wrote:

>Nobody would dispute that having automatic message passing would be nice,
>explicit message passing at the application level is a pain, and is where a lot
>of
>programming errors occur. It's also hard to debug. Unfortunately there still
>isn't
>any other way to achieve really good performance on more than a few processors
>if your application isn't 'embarassingly parallel'. There are research projects
>which
>attempt to provide logically shared memory in a variety of transparent ways,
>but it isn't a solved problem yet, at least not for the general case. For the
>case of a
>machine with lots of processors, (hundreds or thousands), message passing is
>still
>the "state of the art", for now.
>So I think that phrases like "stone age" and "enjoy living in the past" can't b
>e
>applied
>to explicit message passing just yet. However, I'll concede that those opinions
>are
>not "ludicrous" either.  :-)

 You're right. There was no need for me to use such offending phrases. I had
already made a "general" apology, but here is another one: Sorry!

-Kamran