At Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:55:36 +0200, Matthias Troyer wrote:
<snip> Interesting information which one should consider adding to the MPI documentation. </snip>
I disagree. We cannot and should not copy dozens of pages of MPI documentation. Boost.MPI is targeted at an audience that understands MPI but does not presume to teach MPI.
Dozens of pages? Copy? Teach MPI?
AFAICT, Robert is only suggesting adding 83 lines (~4K characters) to the docs. And frankly, even though I understand and have used MPI, none of what I wrote seems obvious to me, and frankly it seems important in explaining to people why they should use Boost.MPI rather than trying to use MPI directly.
The question is where should we stop, where should we start, what should be explained.
I don't think any of that is really in question. We should just add the stuff I wrote there.
The MPI standard documents is several hundred pages long. If you want just a few lines discussing the advantages of Boost.MPI and of skeleton&content then this can be done. If you want us to explain all details of MPI datatypes, all details of the semantics of nonblocking operations (which caused other issues in the past), ....then it will soon be most of the MPI standard or an MPI text book.
Robert only suggested adding the information that I posted, almost none of which is covered in the MPI docs. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com