

Cl-mpi: MPI bindings for Common Lisp - khandekars
http://code.google.com/p/cl-mpi/

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jganetsk
The kids nowadays don't even know about MPI as a framework for parallel
processing. Thank you, MapReduce.

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rjurney
Is that really a bad thing?

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mahmud
Not at all. Programming has become specialized since its inception; there are
systems programmers and application programmers. The former creates the tools
used by the later.

 _But_ , I expect the systems programmers to know not only the ins and outs of
the current technologies, but what came _before_ them. The past is full of
beautiful architectures that didn't succeed for _commercial_ reasons in their
time, but would be perfect candidates to make a comeback in some form in the
future. Even if we have to form a vigilante group of hacking do-gooders who
will mail architects copies of important texts and papers (a la GvR and SICP
;-)

Needless to say, MPI is not one such "lost beauty", more like a committee
designed piece of industry infrastructure. MPI == HPC.

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gruseom
Tell us about some of the lost beauties.

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mahmud
Walk to the CS section of any big university library and scan the shelves for
the purple and gray "LNCS" books (Lecture Notes in Computer Science.) then
weep in sorrow.

Not only is worse better, but industry seems to be at odds with good design.

The examples are simply too numerous and any examples would only be a poor and
narrow representative, skewed to my tastes and my _ignorance_.

All I know is that we deserve better than this; a combination of MIPS,
Smalltalk, Lisp, and Amoeba as mainstream platforms would have been nice.

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JulianMorrison
Anyone who has used MPI - is it any good? A cursory glance makes it look like
slightly gold-plated RPC.

~~~
omnipath
I've used it for school work, but not for a real paying job. It can be good,
but I used MPI raw, which is C based. So there is tons of rope to hang
yourself. I just remember that it was a little difficult to have each spun
process talk to the main process.

