Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi
From: wolin@physics.wm.edu (Elliott Wolin)
Subject: Is MPI for me?
Organization: College of William & Mary, founded 1693
Date: Mon, 1 May 1995 16:14:46 GMT
Message-ID: <1995May1.161446.15191@cs.wm.edu>

Greetings.  I just heard about MPI, got MPICH off the net, but still
don't know if MPI is what I want.

I need a general purpose message passing package which implements
communication among a number of processes on different processors.
The processors will be mostly Unix workstations, with a few PC's
and Mac's thrown in for good measure.  The Unix boxes will be from
different manufacturers (DEC, HP, SGI, SUN, IBM).

An essential requirement is that the number of processes and processors
is NOT fixed...processes can come and go, processors can crash
and reboot, etc.

What I need is sort of a task-to-task e-mail system.  

I want to be able to launch-and-forget messages, and also to launch
and verify receipt, with timeout.  Processes must implement receipt 
queues so they can check their incoming messages when they have time.

This is an online environment for a large nuclear physics detector (CLAS 
at CEBAF) and the system needs to be robust, reliable, and fault tolerant.

I looked into P4, and it is NOT what I need.  I don't have any fixed
process groups.  

So, is MPI (or MPICH) for me?  

--Elliott

************************************************************************
 Elliott Wolin
 Physics Dept.                         "Unix is a maze of twisty,  
 College of William and Mary              little passages, all alike"
 Williamsburg, VA 23185
 wolin@wmheg.physics.wm.edu
************************************************************************



