[Beowulf] RE: programming multicore clusters

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 09:57:08AM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:

> First, shared memory is nice and simple as a programming model. 

Uhuh. You know, there are some studies going where students learning
parallel programming do the same algorithm with MPI and with shared
memory. Would you like to make a bet as to whether they found shared
memory much easier?

> In the implementation, it 
> might be taught about multi-core, and optimizing communication within 
> boxes via shm sockets, and between boxes by other methods.  I think a 
> few of the MPI toolkits do this today (Scali, Intel, OpenMPI, ...).

"a few" should be "almost all".

-- greg