[Stackless] Newbie questions

[Konrad Hinsen]

On Sunday 16 February 2003 16:30, Peter Kropf wrote:
> Out of curiousity, why did you switch from MPI to BSP?

For the same reason that I program in Python and not in C: I don't like to 
have to worry about all the details myself.

BSP is much simpler than MPI (the C library has about 20 calls) and the 
programmer doesn't have to do synchronization, meaning that deadlocks are 
impossible. That eliminates 90% of the problems that MPI developers face in 
debugging. Automatic synchronization also permits new development techniques, 
especially interactive ones. One of my favourite demonstrations involves an 
interactive parallel Python shell (which comes with Scientific Python) 
running within Emacs.

There are other advantages to BSP, such as the possibility to predict the 
performance of a given algorithm on a given parallel machine without even 
writing the code. But for me, simplicity of development is the main reason.

Konrad.

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