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

[Joe Landman]

Ashley Pittman wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 00:02 -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
> 
>> What Microsoft will do is to take away as much of this as they can.  I
>> haven't seen it yet, but I believe they will offer MPICH as a DLL, so if
>> PathScale wants to work along side some other device, you can select
>> this at runtime, and just have it work.  This is a nice idea.
> 
> Perhaps I've missed something here, what do windows DLLs provide that a
> linux .so doesn't?

Nothing.  Unfortunately most folks use statically linked binaries for
MPI, so .so's are not a factor.  I could be wrong, and maybe there is a
way to get statically linked binaries to respect LD_PRELOAD or
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but I am not aware of it.

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.
 Which is about the complexity that most end users/customers want.

> 
> Ashley,

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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