[Beowulf] A start in Parallel Programming?

[Glen Beane]

Kyle Spaans wrote:
does that mean I
> should suck it up and learn Fortran/C/C++?

If you really want to get into parallel programming, you really should know C (actually I think everyone should know C). C++ isn't too much of a stretch once you know C (if you learn the concepts of OO programming), but I find that when I'm writing serious number crunching code that just reads in a datafile, crunches it, and spits out an output file I don't bother with OO.  As someone under the age of 30 that knows Fortran, I wouldn't recommend bothering to pick it up unless you need to work on legacy code.


also keep in mind that there are MPI bindings for other languages. If you want to learn about parallel programming concepts you might be able to develop code faster in something like Python instead of C, but I still like to stick with C for my "real work".


-- 
Glen L. Beane
Software Engineer II
The Jackson Laboratory
www.jax.org