Fortran 90 and BeoMPI

[Daniel Ridge]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, James Cownie wrote:

> Newt wrote :-
> 
> > The point of the compiler wrappers that some MPI vendors ship is usually
> > one of:
> > 
> > 	1. hide the rat's nest of little libraries from the end user
> > 
> > 	2. maintain compatibility with an earlier MPI that (see 1)
> > 
> > These reasons leave a bad taste in my mouth. You should be able to treat
> > MPI like any other library.
> 
> I think you missed the main reason that the MPICH folks, at least,
> implemented wrappers for the compilers which is :-

No -- I understand completely how this happened. I'm saying that the
MPI spec doesn't seem to require this kind of mechanism (unlink PVM
which explicitly includes its own build system). 

> 0. Give a consistent command for compiling MPI codes no matter which
>    platform you are currently working on.

Right. This is a general software problem. Lots of people need consistient
build environments. I would suggest that people who would be in a
position to require per-platform wranglings for MPI often also need to
perform similar wranglings to accomodate differences in the C library
or in the Fortran environment. MPI compiler wrappers hardly seem like
the right place to accomodate these per-platform differences.

./configure seems much more palatable than a per-library compiler
wrappers. I've seen a number of apps that are MPI enabled and which
supply a configure script which work just fine without using the
compiler wrappers.

What I would like is something straight out of the movie 'Network'.
I would like people to go to their windows, open then, and shout
"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it!"

I think that -- with enough collective cleverness -- we could come up
with a better solution.

Regards,
	Dan Ridge
	Scyld Computing Corporation