[Gcl-devel] Re: MPI

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings, and thanks for the query.

I found this at http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/libraries.html:

  A beta version of GCL/MPI is now available by anonymous ftp. This is
  a free software package built on top of MPI and GCL LISP, to easily
  write parallel programs on networks of workstations. GCL/MPI is
  intended as an easy-to-use master-slave distributed architecture. It
  combines the feedback of an interactive language (the GCL or AKCL
  dialect of LISP) with the the use of MPI (Message Passing Interface)
  to take advantage of networks of workstations. As such, it is hoped
  that it will make available an SPMD architecture that helps people
  overcome the initial learning barrier in writing parallel
  programs. Ease-of-use is emphasized while hoping to maintain
  reasonable efficiency and a reasonable feature set. This
  distribution, along with a paper describing it is available by
  anonymous ftp in the directory /pub/people/gene/starmpi at
  ftp.ccs.neu.edu . The current implementation is based on MPI and GCL
  or AKCL, but it should be easily portable to other message passing
  libraries (such as PVM) and other dialects of Common LISP with a
  foreign function interface capable of loading object (.o) files and
  library archive (.a) files. This version is still
  experimental. Comments are gratefully accepted. Thanks to Gene
  Cooperman .

I've downloaded the source, and have gotten the thing to compile with
a few changes.  I have a cluster here, and will be trying to test it
out.  If the licensing works out, I'd like to add this as an
autoloadable module to the distribution, given the popularity of
clustering and the relative advantage it could give to gcl.  And I
have some reasonable mpi experience myself, so its something I can do.

Thoughts from the list welcome.

This also brings up the general question of 3rd party library
interfaces.  If gcl could in theory do something uniquely well for the
free lisp world, this surely should be it, given its close
relationship to the C compiler.  

As faslink has not been implemented for Linux yet, right now the way
one does this is to write a lisp wrapper for the library, compile,
link using the new LINK function I added for maxima, exit and restart.
One no longer needs the source tree.

Improvements could be the elimination of the need for the wrapper, and
using dlopen to access the library in the live image, with this
dynamic link being preserved on save-system.  I don't know if either
are even possible, but they would preserve the incremental nature of
lisp, it seems.

Coming from the C world, the idea of having to write a wrapper for
every 3rd party library one wants to use will permanently retard the
use of lisp, I'd think.  Reimplementing everything in lisp, while in
theory possible and even appealing, is not practical given the volume
of high quality free software now available.

Take care,


root <address@hidden> writes:

> Camm,
> 
> We have just installed a beowulf cluster and I want to convince
> the university to use GCL. Do you know of a working MPI extension?
> 
> Tim
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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