Talk:Message Passing Interface

Java Section: possible violation of copyright

The Java section has been given a template that says "This article or section appears to have been copied and pasted from a source, possibly in violation of a copyright". Where does it appear to have been copied from? If I knew that I would check the copyright situation, and if necessary have a go at editing it to remove the problem. Without that information I would have to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch, which would be pointless if in fact it does not violate copyright.

JamesBWatson (talk) 20:12, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Further to my comment above: I have searched for possible sources. Every single source I have managed to find has clearly been copied from one version or another of this page. I have found no evidence at all to support the suggestion that the section has been copied from elsewhere. The section was tagged as copied and pasted by an anonymous editor (from IP address 129.93.158.35) on 7 September 2008. I am going to remove the tag. If anyone has any information confirming that this section has been copied from elsewhere, perhaps they can restore the tag, and add information as to where it has been copied from.

Tagging articles is a useful function, but please remember to give information about what is wrong, what needs to be fixed, in what way things could be better.

JamesBWatson (talk) 12:21, 16 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This section has word for word copy form the site that it links to http://mpj-express.org/ it acutaly feels like add copy pasted in to wikipidea.

Implementations

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]

Trying to help, but what's a Quinn's book? --Earin (talk) 13:17, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Concepts"

These seem a little biased towards the task-farmy end of MPI, and a little too jargonised for an introduction. Perhaps some simplification is in order? --Earin (talk) 13:17, 25 June 2008 (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]

163.1.125.49 (talk) 11:24, 31 October 2008 (UTC) : PVM is fringe technology. Sorry, but it's true. In 4 years in parallel computing, I've only ever received one request for PVM-based software, out of hundreds of applications across tens of different disciplines. The PVM page is 101% wrong with the completely slanted words "PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed computing world-wide"[reply]

The claim that PVM is a de facto standard was removed by an anonymous editor on 29 November 2007. No reason appears to have been given. JamesBWatson (talk) 20:43, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]