From help-request at octave dot org Thu Jan 27 01:59:39 2005
Subject: Re: Octave of MP systems
From: Javier =?iso-8859-1?Q?Fern=E1ndez?= Baldomero <javier at atc dot ugr dot es>
To: Jonathan Greenberg <jgreenberg at arc dot nasa dot gov>
CC: "help at octave dot org" <help@octave.org>, javier@atc.ugr.es
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 08:58:32 +0100



Hi Jonathan,

Jonathan Greenberg escribió:
> 
> Has anyone used octave on huge MP systems (# processors > 256)?  Is there a

I have tried octave in a cluster of 8 computers, and Michael Creel
has written a paper on econometrics using octave on 16 computers.
Of course, I'm also interested in knowing of the most node-spreaded
octave parallel application so far :-)

Michael used MPITB for his parallel applications. I keep track of them
at
http://atc/javier-bin/mpitb		(this is mine)
http://pareto.uab.es/wp/2005/63705.pdf	(this is Michael's)

> listing of MP-optimized algorithms anywhere, and a discussion of issues
> concerning Octave MP support?
> 

Again, I'm also interested if you find something on that subject.
There are the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, and people porting them
to optimized MATLAB code, like

http://www.ece.osu.edu/~bussb/research/

Some time ago I prepared a "scrapbook" to make up my mind about
the announcements and discussions on MPI in the octave mailing lists.
In a first section I extracted the download links as I found them
mentioned in the posts. In the second section I chronologically
ordered the different posts that I could find dealing on parallel
Octave, adding a small remark summarizing each thread. I made a
poster for the VecPar Conference (also linked in MPITB web above)
which used that info.

I still keep it, but all remarks are in spanish. Drop me an e-mail
and I'll gladly send it to you. Also drop me an e-mail or post
again here if you find more information on Octave on MP :-)

Last year I was looking for time-consuming octave applications to
port to MPITB (in the end it's been Michael who has done the work :-).
BTW, I would be glad if somebody helped me choose at least one Chemicals
application that I could port to MPITB, for several reasons:

- Octave was a ChemEng professor, the fastest when it came to
calculations :-)
	* http://www.octave.org/history.html
- There are strong research lines in ChemEng Depts dealing on computer
simulation
	* http://www.octave.org/history.html again
	    Octave helped ChemEng students with reactor design
	* http://capd.cheme.cmu.edu/newsletters/March_03.PDF
	    for instance, in this link you will hardly find a research line
	    not dealing with time-consuming computations/simulations
- The examples of the reactor design book are online :-)
	* http://www.che.wisc.edu/jbr-group/
	  http://www.che.wisc.edu/~jbraw/chemreacfun/

If only somebody could help me choose one of those examples to
parallelize :-)
(one that is time-consuming and can be somehow split in independent
subtasks)

-javier



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