[Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

[Lux, Jim (US 7140)]

From: Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org> on behalf of Jim Cownie <jcownie at gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2020 at 4:17 AM
To: Douglas Eadline <deadline at eadline.org>
Cc: "beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

As ever, good stuff from Doug, but I’ll just add a little more background.

When we standardised MPI-1 (I was in the room in Dallas for most of this :-)) we did not expect it still to be the dominant interface which users would be coding to 25 years later, rather we expected that MPI would form a reasonable basis for higher level interfaces to be built upon, and we hoped that it would provide enough performance and be rich enough semantically to allow that to happen.
Therefore our aim was not to make it a perfect, high-level, end-user interface, but rather to make it something which we (as implementers) knew how to implement efficiently while providing a reasonable, portable, vendor-neutral layer which would be usable either by end-user code, or by higher-level libraries (which could certainly include runtime libraries for higher level languages).


>>>> one can say the same about Fortran and C – which is why they are persistently popular


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