From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Fri Feb  2 21:55:37 2001
Subject: Re: MPI
From: Alex Verstak <averstak at vt dot edu>
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 22:53:49 -0500 (EST)


I cannot give you an example, but I can explain why they wrote
it in the standard this way.  MPI/C is a low-level API for a
low-level language, so this requirement is not unreasonable.
A few parallel systems at the time passed start-up information
as arguments, so the MPI folks decided to make life easier for
those systems.  Standards are not meant to create good designs;
they merely codify the existing practice.  (As a side note, MPI
is one of the cleanest standards in parallel computing.)

I already explained how MPICH uses this feature.  I don't know
about other MPI implementations, but experience suggests that
any provision of a standard, no matter how weird, will be used
by some implementation just because it can be.

=alex


On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  2-Feb-2001, Alex Verstak <averstak at vt dot edu> wrote:
> 
> | A quote from the MPI Standard:
> | `An MPI implementation is free to require that the arguments in the C
> | binding must be the arguments to main.'
> 
> This makes no sense to me.  Can you (or anyone) give me an example of
> a case where it would matter?
> 
> jwe
> 



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