If you want to continue this conversation in a more appropriate forum,
may I recommend the Beowulf mailing list? Discussing *anything*
HPC-related is fair game there. It's a low-volume list, but the
conversation can get quite lively sometimes.
https://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
On 8/7/20 11:37 AM, Gilles Gouaillardet via users wrote:
The goal of Open MPI is to provide a high quality of the MPI standard,
and the goal of this mailing list is to discuss Open MPI (and not the
MPI standard)
The Java bindings support "recent" JDK, and if you face an issue,
please report a bug (either here or on github)
Cheers,
Gilles
----- Original Message -----
Hello,
This may be a bit of a longer post and I am not sure if it is even
appropriate here but I figured I ask. There are no hidden agendas
in it, so please treat it as "asking for opinions/advice", as
opposed to judging or provoking.
For the period between 2010 to 2017 I used to work in (buzzword
alert!) "big data" (meaning Spark, HDFS, reactive stuff like Akka)
but way before that in the early 2000s I used to write basic
multithreaded C and some MPI code. I came back to HPC/academia two
years ago and what struck me was that (for lack of better word)
the field is still "stuck" (again, for lack of better word) on
MPI. This itself may seem negative in this context, however, I am
just stating my observation, which may be wrong.
I like low level programming and I like being in control of what
is going on but having had the experience in Spark and Akka, I
kind of got spoiled. Yes, I understand that the latter has
fault-tolerance (which is nice) and MPI doesn't (or at least,
didn't when I played with in 1999-2005) but I always felt like MPI
needed higher level abstractions as a CHOICE (not _only_ choice)
laid over the bare metal offerings. The whole world has moved onto
programming in patterns and higher level abstractions, why is the
academic/HPC world stuck on bare metal, still? Yes, I understand
that performance often matters and the higher up you go, the more
performance loss you incur, however, there is also something to be
said about developer time and ease of understanding/abstracting
etc. etc.
Be that as it may, I am working on a project now in the HPC world
and I noticed that Open MPI has Java bindings (or should I say
"interface"?). What is the state of those? Which JDK do they
support? Most importantly, would it be a HUGE pipe dream to think
about building patterns a-la Akka (or even mixing actual Akka
implementation) on top of OpenMPI via this Java bridge? What would
be involved on the OpenMPI side? I have time/interest in going
this route if there would be any hope of coming up with something
that would make my life (and future people coming into HPC/MPI)
easier in terms of building applications. I am not saying MPI in
C/C++/Fortran should go away, however, sometimes we don't need the
low-level stuff to express a concept :-). It may also open a whole
new world for people on large clusters...
Thank you!
--
Prentice Bisbal
Lead Software Engineer
Research Computing
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
http://www.pppl.gov
