[Beowulf] MS HPC... Oh dear...

[Joe Landman]

Ashley Pittman wrote:

>> More to the point, this dynamic binding allows you to write to the API,
>> present a consistent ABI, and handle the hardware details elsewhere in a
>> driver which can be linked in by the .so/.dll/.eieio method at runtime.
> 
> That's exactly what I thought.  I was thrown by your "This is a nice
> idea" comment because using Windows is no different to Linux in this
> respect.

The major difference will be that Microsoft enforces its worldview here,
which in this particular point, will likely be more in line with what we
should see on Linux, but don't for a variety of reasons (see Greg L's
post on MPI ABI).  We need it, we just haven't collectively decided that
there is enough pain to make this the general case yet.  Microsoft
decided (correctly) that this was a good thing, and will just do it.
This will have a number of side effects, including making "porting" to
new hardware communication adapters MPI stacks a thing of the past, but
only on windows.  Not on Linux.

> 
> Ashley,

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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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