Re: [swarm-hackers] Swarm on MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Scott Christley wrote:
> OpenCL struck me as well, especially now that they have the on-the-fly 
> compilation/linking/loading (I've been wanting this for years!).  
I've been using the Snow Leopard implementation for a few months, and 
more recently the AMD/ATI 2.0 stream SDK.   I agree the on-the-fly 
compilation is a real win, if for no other reason than to perfect loop 
unrolling.  Both are LLVM-based but unfortunately there is no viable 
open-source answer. 
> Not so much for strict ABM but more for hybrid models where you have 
> different methods that need to be integrated, to get the most 
> efficient code, you need to intertwine the different methods.  For 
> example, I'm working on a model with discrete cells in 3D space that 
> move, each cell has a gene network (ODE) and that network is tied to 
> cell-cell neighbor interaction, so it is not really possible to 
> separate out the two pieces, they need to be integrated together into 
> the same code.  I suppose the big question is if these "model 
> integration links" can be determined automatically to know what code 
> to produce.
I don't really believe there is any way to do this until you build some 
of them.  Then they could be factored into convenient interfaces and 
become cookie-cutters for similar problems.   At which point it isn't 
science anymore, so why bother with it.  ;-)

C++ template parameterization is the usual answer, but that's very 
rigid.  As I see it a big weakness of C and Java are the 
weak/noneexistent macro systems.  Compared to Common Lisp, where whole 
programs can be built from the language itself (instead of a small 
crippled preprocessor language). 

Marcus