[Beowulf] A start in Parallel Programming?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 10:58:00AM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> I think that this does them a disservice.  From the BLAS support
> section:

OK, so I only read the FFT section of the docs. But the compaint was
about lack of parallelism, and if ATLAS can be linked, you get
threaded parallelism for free. See the power of a standardized
interface?

And they _have_ changed the user interface unnecessarily. When a
community has exactly one interface for a library, not inventing a new
one is a good thing. Here, they are only using the standard interface
under the hood. So they want fancy data types. Well, you can still use
the standard interface with minimal changes to get your fancy data
types -- and they didn't. But while we're on the topic:

> So you can use gsl_vector_get(v,i) to get the ith element of the
> gsl_vector v with all sorts of range and bounds checking,

For those from Planet Fortran, we have this thing called a "one
dimensional array" (a part of the standardized language) which works
with "compiler bounds checking" (available in all compilers). Gah.  If
I use ordinary arrays in C, it sounds like it's a lot of work to use
the GSL in my code.

> This is unfortunately not that easy to consistently DO -- as the list
> has discussed, MPI doesn't really have an ABI yet.

Hey! That's my line!

-- greg