On Oct 22, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Lourival Mendes wrote:
Hy everybody, I'm interested in use the MPI on the Pascal
environment. I tryed the MPICH2 list but no success. On the Free
Pascal Compiler list, Daniël invited me to subscribe this list and
open a discussion on the interface of OpenMPI for Pascal.
Probably as Daniël knows there is almost no reference on the MPI
for Pascal interface, only some very few tryes, one of them in
Russian.
I would like to know if there is someone working on the interface
of OpenMPI for Pascal?
There was a mail or two about it a while ago; you might want to dig
through the OMPI list archives. The short version is that none of
the current Open MPI members have a desire to add Pascal bindings to
MPI. It also might be somewhat of an uphill battle to convince the
old-school MPI'ers to include a Pascal interface in Open MPI, even if
it was developed by a 3rd party and contributed to the project.
However, that should not deter you from pursuing a Pascal interface
if you want one. Traditionally, extensions to MPI have been
implemented in an MPI-neutral fashion and released into the wild as
3rd party libraries (such as the C++ bindings for MPI several years
ago). The Pascal bindings likely don't need to know anything about
the internals of an MPI implementation -- they can just call the C
bindings. So it's possible/likely that you would write up a Pascal
interface that would work with both Open MPI and MPICH (and any other
MPI's out there).
As I typed out the above, I have a dim recollection of the Pascal
interface needing to obtain the values of the C constants during its
setup/compilation phase (note that these values are going to be
different between different MPI implementations). You have a few
options here; you could write a parser for mpi.h to extract the
values you need (e.g., in perl or somesuch) or write a short C
program to extract them and printf the values that you capture into a
Pascal header file or something (I'm not sure if you need the literal
or symbolic values -- I remember very little of Pascal). Either way,
with a little diligence and creativity, it could probably be done.
Also I'm putting a very newbie question: What is the main
difference between the OpenMPI and MPICH ?
Short version: we're different projects implementing the same API
standard.
--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems
