----- Forwarded message from "J. Andrew Rogers" <and...@ceruleansystems.com> -----
From: "J. Andrew Rogers" <and...@ceruleansystems.com> Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 10:36:31 -0700 To: Friends of Rohit Khare <f...@xent.com> Subject: Re: [FoRK] FaceBook tries to cream Google X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1084) Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <f...@xent.com> On Apr 8, 2011, at 8:05 AM, Stephen Williams wrote: > > Agreed. Strange that MPI isn't more widely used (outside supercomputing > projects). Although, I'm not aware of it expecting and handling faults / > rework as a good Mapreduce imitation, and similar systems, must. It is not that strange, MPI is a bit brittle as a communication library standard. Implementations tend to make simplifying assumptions that are not valid for some parallel applications. You can patch it up to do anything but the level of effort required seems to relegate it to just being used in scientific computing for which it was designed. I've seen ZeroMQ being increasingly used for roughly the same purpose as MPI in "normal" distributed systems, and I personally do not see much reason to prefer the latter over the former for most things. The difference is history. MPI's weakness is that it started from a mediocre design that immediately became part of a standards process, with all the politics and buy-in that entails. It is also badly documented as a practical matter. ZMQ also started with a somewhat dodgy early design but as a library rather than a standard; it was iterated by hackers over several versions into a more sensible and capable design. ZMQ has been willing to break backward compatibility to fix behaviors that irritated the programmers that use it or add badly needed features, which is possible because the "standard" is the implementation. J. Andrew Rogers _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
