Re: Isn't this in favour of Ada??

["Tassilo v. Parseval" <tassilo.von.parseval@rwth-aachen.de>]

Also sprach Pascal Obry:

> "Tassilo v. Parseval" <tassilo.von.parseval@rwth-aachen.de> writes:
>
>> I don't think that Ada tasks and MPI are comparable. MPI is mainly used
>
> I'm not talking about Ada tasking. I'm talking about Ada distributed
> annex.

My apologies, I must have missed that part. However...

>> Furthermore, MPI allows you to write a program that does a calculation
>> in parallel on your computer and, say, NEC's earth simulator because
>> data-exchange between processors can happen over TCP/IP. So MPI really
>> is a way to distribute one application across a huge distributed system
>> involving workstations that can be anywhere on the internet.
>
> Idem for Ada *distributed* annex.

Annex E doesn't say much about these things. It's normative in that it
says that RPC is to be used (with message passing remaining, at least,
an option) and puts some requirements on the three different library
units involved.

This whole annex is merely a few pages. Compare that with MPI 2.0 which
consists of 370 pages. It defines in great depth all the data-types that
an MPI conformant systems needs to implement and the whole interface.
That makes MPI extremely portable.

Whereas Ada's distributed annex leaves almost everything up to the
actual implementation.

>> Also, there are MPI bindings for Ada which wouldn't be the case if those
>> two had the same niches in mind.
>
> That's not a proof! It could mean that somebody wanted to use Ada in a larger
> project where C++/MPI was used for example.

Maybe. But the mere fact that you can write a small MPI application in
Ada and connect it to an already existing one running elsewhere speaks
in favour of MPI. MPI is huge in that in certain fields it is used
almost exclusively, owing to the fact that its standard is so
comprehensive and non-ambiguous.

Tassilo
-- 
use bigint;
$n=71423350343770280161397026330337371139054411854220053437565440;
$m=-8,;;$_=$n&(0xff)<<$m,,$_>>=$m,,print+chr,,while(($m+=8)<=200);