> I'm about to start a course that goes by the title of "Computational > Physics", and as I was having a look at the items that we are going to > cover, and saw that there's an "Introduction to parallel computing and > parallel programming with Message Passing Interface (MPI)". Some of > you 9fans may be familiar with this protocol, any comments on it? can > you recommend a book on this topic (not MPI, but concurrent stuff in > general)? how plan9 solves this problem, if at all? Any feedback is > welcome âº
the open source implementations of MPI (mpich1, mpich2, openmpi) all have little examples to play with and get started -- and also test the installation. I would recommend to start by playing with those. It has been years since I had taken the initial intros to MPI/PVM, but at the time the supercomputer center had some nice tutorials and online documentation. So, I would search a number of these installations. Other than that, you might want to download some of the models which use MPI and possibly play with them. Depending on the size of the codebase this might scare you off a bit, but I actually find playing with the GCM WRF and RegCM3 rather enlightening once I got past the initial frustrations... On second thought I never got over my frustrations, but this brings me to a pet peve -- if you are looking into modeling and are not a computer scientist by training, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE at LEAST sit in a course on algorithms and data structures, and possibly another one in software engineering. For all the theoretical physicists, ecologists, biologists, sociologists, and economists I have worked with, I have yet to meet one which have had more than a practicum in FORTRAN and/or C/C++. If you already have a CS background, you come to understand why some of the code still makes me twitch...
