On Jun 29, 2006, at 5:00 PM, Dean Michael Berris wrote:
Is there a consideration of using asio to implement the actual MPI standard, so that the candidate Boost.MPI will also implement the MPI standard in case there aren't any available MPI implementations for the platform? I'm thinking if asio will work on many different platforms (maybe even embedded devices), then maybe Boost.MPI can have a canned MPI implementation that comes along with it?
I, personally, am not at all interested in implementing the MPI standard. There are high-quality, high-performance, portable implementations available already (<shameless plug>Open MPI, for instance</shameless plug>). Building MPI on top of asio would require a *huge* investment, and we would not have a chance at beating existing MPI implementations in either portability or performance. No, it's better that we just provide the best C++ interface we can to the C library. That said, we can still try to *influence* MPI implementations, especially where there is a poor match between what C++ needs and what the C MPI bindings provide. For instance, MPI is very poor at receiving messages of unknown length. We could improve our implementation of the C++ bindings significantly if that issue could be addressed at a lower level. Doug