[Beowulf] programming questions here?

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 4 May 2007, Matt wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for a mailing list, newsgroup, or whatever, where people
> are interested in talking about practical programming issues on
> parallel machines. Optimizing and maintaining code, software
> engineering for high performance code, or debugging, are the types of
> things I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in research so
> much as practical information that can be put to use now.
>
> Are there many programmers lurking on this list? It looks mostly to be
> OS issues (which makes sense, given the subject).

There are many programmers on the list.  Indeed, I'd guess that the
majority of posters are coders as well as admins, cluster engineers,
researchers.  If you want to see the coders in action, just post a
question like "Is C or Pascal a better language for writing parallel
code."  Just be sure to put on a biohazard suit first.

Actually (more seriously) if you look back at the list archives you'll
see lots of discussions on writing PVM and MPI code, a number of
"friendly" religious wars on which language is the best, a fair number
of articles on specific programming issues associated with a piece of
code.  All completely reasonable usage of the list, even if the issue
isn't strictly about parallel code -- folks are happy to help out or
talk about coding because they ARE coders and therefore like to show off
their chops;-).

There are also introductory resources on parallel coding methodology
archived and delivered by places like the cluster monkey website saved
from the short-lived Cluster World Magazine columns.  Lots of articles
on e.g. MPI, a few on PVM (mostly written by me:-).

This kind of discussion doesn't usually 'dominate' the list traffic, but
it is definitely an important component.

    rgb

>
> Comp.parallel originally used to be a place for what I'm looking for
> but, I'm not sure how to say this, it's basically just a place to
> announce conferences anymore.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matt
>
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-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu