Talk:Message Passing Interface

I started the "Implementations" section. My goal for it was for programmers looking to get involved in nuts and bolts cluster computing to look up the languages (they already knew or that maybe they should think of learning), determine which langauges have one or more good implementations, and choose their language and MPI implementation based on the NPOV information presented. That's the "necessary and sufficient information" I'd see this section containing in "finished form". Not that it's binding or anything :-P I just thought I'd throw out a "reasonable goal" to maybe inspire some cool edits. - JenniferForUnity 02:15, 2 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There, I have been working heavily on the Java version because of my current involvement with it. I also added a "Funcionality overview" section before the implementation one, since the article doesn't explain well what MPI is supposed to do. And no, "handling communication between nodes of computers" is not enough, so I tried hinting at a few examples like reduction/gathering and barriers. EpiVictor 17:34, 5 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bad article

Needs pedagogical cleanup, preferably from Quinn's book. This will take time. Help plz. Khazadum 05:05, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Conflicting information

Both Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface have conflicting information, and blatant POV.

From Parallel Virtual Machine as of February 6, 2007:

PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at minimal additional cost. Hundreds of sites around the world are using PVM to solve important scientific, industrial, and medical problems in addition to PVM's use as an educational tool to teach parallel programming. With tens of thousands of users, PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed computing world-wide.

From Message Passing Interface as of February 6, 2007:

MPI is a de facto standard for communication among the processes modeling a parallel program on a distributed memory system. Often these programs are mapped to clusters, actual distributed memory supercomputers, and to other environments. However, the principal MPI-1 model has no shared memory concept, and MPI-2 has only a limited distributed shared memory concept used in one portion of that set of extensions.

Since both PVM and MPI are used for distributed parallel applications, more or less for the same purpose, but they are incompatible with each other, it is strange that both are de facto standard.

--Juliano (T) 00:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

the fact remains though, that they both have widespread use, both are a de facto standard - one does not preclude the other. --Ear1grey 03:27, 21 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]