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Parallel Computing

Curtis Jensen cjensen at bioeng.ucsd.edu
Fri Dec 8 16:26:16 EST 2000 
Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> 
> Curtis Jensen <cjensen at bioeng.ucsd.edu> writes:
> 
> > I haven't had much luck on finding anything about parallel computing via
> > Python.  Does Python support this?  Or do we just need to write a C
> > module to run parallel code?  Thanks.
> 
> It depends on what you mean exactly by "parallel code", but I suppose
> that for most interpretations the answer is that you can do it in
> Python using existing modules.
> 
> I'll limit myself to the kind of parallel computing that I do myself,
> which is algorithm parallelization implemented via MPI. Version 2.1 of
> ScientificPython (available at
> ftp://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/ScientificPython/) contains an interface
> to the most commonly used MPI functions plus the necessary
> infrastructure to make Python run as an MPI application, and to permit
> C extension modules to use MPI as well without linking to it
> (important if you use dynamic libraries). With this package, you can
> use MPI in Python in exactly the same way you would do in C or
> Fortran. The data objects that can be passed between processes are
> NumPy arrays and strings.
> 
> However, most real-life parallel code will also contain C code for
> speed; you wouldn't use a parallel machine if speed weren't important.
> But you can end up with an efficient program in which most code is
> Python. For an example, see the development releases (2.1.x) of the
> Molecular Modelling Toolkit (available at
> ftp://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/MMTK/).
> 

Sorry I suppose I should have been more specific in what I was asking. 
I was looking for something like what Mr. Hinsen suggested.  Though, I
am also interested in RPC;  I didn't expect to get responces about
that.  Glad I did.

bye the way, the above links are a bit off. I believe they should be:
ftp://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/pub/ScientificPython/
and
ftp://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/pub/MMTK/

Thanks.

-- 
Curtis Jensen
cjensen at bioeng.ucsd.edu
http://www-bioeng.ucsd.edu/~cjensen/
FAX (425) 740-1451
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