> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Behalf Of Greg Lindahl > Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 9:43 PM > To: beowulf@beowulf.org > Subject: Re: [Beowulf] MS HPC... Oh dear... > > On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 09:36:23PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote: > > > This frustrates software builders, and end users. My point is that > > there is a better way, and Greg indicated that he had > > supported/proposed it. > > By the way, chatting with other interconnect vendors and also with > ISVs, we're pretty much all for it. The group that hated the idea was > MPI implementors, both free and commercial. I tried several different > forms of sweet-talking, none got anywhere. It's clearly a sign that > someone else needs to do the sweet-talking! > > Also by the by, what Microsoft is doing isn't really an ABI, but it > acts like one: you use MPICH-2's header files and replace the MPICH-2 > DLL. Now for interconnect vendors this is easiest to do if you have an > MPICH-2 adi3 device. You'd have to be mildly masocistic to write a > layer that translates to some other MPI guts, but if anyone does, > please share. >
This is not quite right. You do have to build your app with our header file. This is very similar to MPICH-2 but there are a few changes. Most importantly, we added calling convention specifications to the function prototypes. 32-bit x86 on Windows has a variety of common calling conventions and the MPICH-2 header files do not have this concept (neither does the MPI standard). Also we have a single header file for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows which makes life a bit simpler. The high-speed interconnects plug into our MPI stack through Winsock Direct. This enables low-latency usermode I/O at the sockets level. Any application that uses sockets will benefit from the high speed interconnect without relinking or recompiling. A C-style ABI is pretty straightforward, but once you throw Fortran and C++ into the mix, things get a lot uglier. John Vert Development Manager Windows High Performance Computing _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
