RE: [pooma-dev] Some POOMA questions

[Richard Guenther]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, James Crotinger wrote:

> >> 3. Is there any work being done to bring SMARTS up to speed? For
> >> parallell execution I'd like to try running on a MOSIX cluster, using
> >> SMARTS to do the threading, but the current SMARTS in CVS fails to
> >> compile the same way it did when I tried it briefly last year (there's
> >> some conflict with pthreads)
>
> > Still the same - I have some work on OpenMP support in my queue (but need
> > to finalize reduction support) that will perhaps make SMARTS unnecessary.
> > I myself use cheetah for MPI parallelization on a workstation cluster.
>
> The real advantage of SMARTS was its data-flow ability, which is not
> something OpenMP will recover (unless OpenMP has some magic that it didn't
> have when I last looked). That said, SMARTS is pretty complex and its
> light-weight threads are very machine-dependent -- it was still pre-beta
> software on anything except the SGIs when the development ended. I think it
> would make a great research project, but I wouldn't push it as part of
> production POOMA.

That was my impression, too. I do that OpenMP work basically to allow easy
scaling to 2-8 processor machines and maybe allow hybrid OpenMP/MPI
parallelization (dropping cheetah in favor of "native" MPI support is next
on my todo).

Richard.

--
Richard Guenther <richard dot guenther at uni-tuebingen dot de>
WWW: http://www.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de/~rguenth/