Parallel Python

[Carl J. Van Arsdall]

Just as something to note, but many HPC applications will use a 
combination of both MPI and threading (OpenMP usually, as for the 
underlying thread implementation i don't have much to say).  Its 
interesting to see on this message board this huge "anti-threading" 
mindset, but the HPC community seems to be happy using a little of both 
depending on their application and the topology of their parallel 
machine.  Although if I was doing HPC applications, I probably would not 
choose to use Python but I would write things in C or FORTRAN. 

What I liked about python threads was that they were easy whereas using 
processes and IPC is a real pain in the butt sometimes.  I don't 
necessarily think this module is the end-all solution to all of our 
problems but I do think that its a good thing and I will toy with it 
some in my spare time.  I think that any effort to making python 
threading better is a good thing and I'm happy to see the community 
attempt to make improvements.  It would also be cool if this would be 
open sourced and I'm not quite sure why its not.

-carl
 

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Carl J. Van Arsdall
cvanarsdall at mvista.com
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