use Perl

Righty ho. I've got Parallel::MPI::Simple working on two different platforms now so am quite happy and bouncy. The tests don't always run in the correct order, but that's the price of having multiple processes at once.

Fun problems I encountered:

• The SGI MPI implementation doesn't enforce the MPI-1 standard correctly as MPI_Dup_comm didn't have to be collective but clearly must be.
• People running 20 processes on a 16 node box are annoying.
• Being perly in approach makes it a lot easier to define an API to something, as you can wrap your C-wrappers in even more perl giving you plenty of room to modify the module's guts any time you like.

What do I still need to do?

• Work out a way to get platform specific compiler flags to Inline::C, this might need some Makefile.PL magic but is essential to the module working as various mpi implementations expect different library linkages.
• Test the thing on beowulfs
• Test the thing on inhomogeneous beowulfs
• Write useful examples
• Release!

But what does the far future hold...?

• Some things from MPI-2:
  • Process spawning
  • Inter language calling
• grafting into Quantum::Entanglement (why else would I write this module..?)

In other news, had great fun at our lifesaving competition including coming second out of eighteen teams, which was cool. Then spent Sunday in Wales in a Kayak (and about two minutes in the water at the bottom of a stretch of grade-III). Much of the rest of my time has been filled with work for classes and investigations of the jobs I could do. It's proving to be much easier to decide that companies suck than it is to decide they are worth working for. I do at least have a couple of nice places to try now.

Oh, and Inline::C ROCKS!