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

[Jim Lux]

At 08:55 AM 6/12/2006, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>From: "Jim Lux" <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov>
>>I'll just be waiting for the .NET Framework 2.x "cluster computing 
>>namespace" with all the message passing primitives.
>
>Oh such primitives will undoubtfully get casted onto the tcp/ip library using
>the swapfile.


Actually.. According to MS:
  (April 2006 MSDN Magazine)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/04/ClusterComputing/default.aspx

MSMPI provides a standard messaging implementation for the Windows platform 
based on MPICH2, an open source implementation of MPI 2.0 started by the 
Argonne National Laboratory. MSMPI supports language bindings for 
Fortran77, Fortran90, C, and C++. CCS does not provide a Microsoft® .NET 
Framework class library for MPI. However, jobs implemented with serial 
tasks can be developed in .NET Framework-compliant languages, and jobs that 
do rely on MPI can use many of the MPI functions through P/Invoke. Future 
versions of the CCS are expected to provide a .NET Framework interface for MPI.


--- P/Invoke is the .NET way in which you make OS API calls.

I'm kind of surprised that they're not providing a Framework class 
library.  P/Invoke is largely viewed as a "hack" within the developer 
community, because it relies on a lot of knowledge about the underlying 
OS.  You "should" have all those little details encapsulated in a nice 
class library.



Jim