[Chicago] MPI in Python?

[Kenneth P. Stox]

On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 10:16 -0600, Massimo Di Pierro wrote:
> If you need parallelization ,you care about speed. If you care about  
> speed use C/C++.

Not necessarily true. It all depends on the workload. 

> In C/C++ there are many libraries based on MPI that allow programming  
> at higher level (for example http://www.fermiqcd.net, despite the  
> pitch for physics it is actually very general for mesh based  
> algorithms).

A lot of the fermiqcd code is to produce a backwards compatible
interface for the older ACP/MAPS code. I'm not sure it would be the
right choice, but once again, it is highly dependent upon the workload. 

> 
> You use threads on shared memory machines (like a SG), you use MPI on  
> distributed memory machines (like a cluster). There is really no choice.

I assume you meant to say SGI, as in Origin and Altix. There are times
one can, and will, use MPI on a shared memory machine, if one also wants
to be able to scale beyond the one machine.