My last blog post and MCAPI and MPI is worth some further explanation…
There were a number of good questions raised (both publicly in comments, and privately to me via email).
I ended up chatting with some MCAPI people from PolyCore Software: Sven Brehmer and Ted Gribb. We had a very interesting discussion which I won’t try to replicate here. Instead, we ended up recording an RCE-Cast today about MCAPI and MPI. It’ll be released in a few weeks (Brock already had one teed up to be released this weekend).
The main idea is that Sven and Ted were not trying to say that MCAPI is faster/better than MPI.
MCAPI is squarely aimed at a different market than MPI — the embedded market. Think: accelerators, DSPs, FPGAs, etc. And although MCAPI can be used for larger things (e.g., multiple x86-type servers on a network), there’s already well-established high-quality tools for that (e.g., MPI).
So perhaps it might be interesting to explore the realm of MPI + MCAPI in some fashion.
There’s a bunch of different forms that (MPI + MCAPI) could take — which one(s) would be useful? I cited a few forms in my prior blog post; we talked about a few more on the podcast.
But it’s hard to say without someone committing to doing some research, or a customer saying “I want this.” Talk is cheap — execution requires resources.
Would this be something that you, gentle reader, would be interested in? If so, let me know in the comments or drop me an email.
Tags: HPC, MCAPI, mpi, Multicore Association