On 12 Jun 2006, at 15:49, Joe Landman wrote:
Ashley Pittman wrote:
On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 00:02 -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
What Microsoft will do is to take away as much of this as they
can. I
haven't seen it yet, but I believe they will offer MPICH as a
DLL, so if
PathScale wants to work along side some other device, you can select
this at runtime, and just have it work. This is a nice idea.
Perhaps I've missed something here, what do windows DLLs provide
that a
linux .so doesn't?
Nothing. Unfortunately most folks use statically linked binaries for
MPI, so .so's are not a factor. I could be wrong, and maybe there
is a
way to get statically linked binaries to respect LD_PRELOAD or
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but I am not aware of it.
More to the point, this dynamic binding allows you to write to the
API,
present a consistent ABI, and handle the hardware details elsewhere
in a
driver which can be linked in by the .so/.dll/.eieio method at
runtime.
Which is about the complexity that most end users/customers want.
As I understand it this is what Intel's MPI (for LInux) does, so that
you can choose the underlying hardware transport without relinking
your code.
http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/cluster/mpi/
index.htm
(FWIW I work for Intel, but not on MPI, and I certainly don't speak
for them ;-)
--
-- Jim
--
James Cownie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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