On Jan 2, 2014, at 10:50 AM, Jed Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> I find simple demonstrations as unconvincing as most patents. 99% of > the work remains in extending the idea into something practical. It may > or may not pan out, but we can't say anything from the simple > demonstration alone. Maybe you and I disagree on what I'm demonstrating. My goal was to show that my notion of parallelism generalizes MPI & tasking notions. Not that I have a better notation for VecScatters. And from this demonstration we can definitely say something: namely that I've shown how one API can address multiple types of parallelism. That's more than any other system I know of. The most interesting question to me is if I can do heterogeneity. There I have to wave my hands somewhat vigorously. But let's be constructive: I want to use this demonstration to get funding. NSF/DOE/Darpa, I don't know. Now if you can't say anything from this simple demonstration, then what would convince you as a reviewer? > another layer of callbacks If you have mentioned that objection before it escaped my attention. Yes, I agree that in that respect (which has little to do with the parallelism part) my demonstration is not optimal. The unification of MPI & tasks is going too far there. For MPI it would be possible to have calls like VecScatterBegin/End and instead of a callback just have the local node code in place. For task models that is not possible (afaik). See for instance Quark, where each task contains a function pointer and a few data pointers. Victor. -- Victor Eijkhout, 512 471 5809 (w) Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin
