[plt-scheme] MPI Bindings?

Grant,

On Apr 12, 2010, at 4:05 PM, Grant Rettke wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> For my distributed & parallel computing coursework I would like to
> write PLT Scheme bindings to OpenMPI. From what I can find, none exist
> already, and I wanted to confirm that with the crowd.
> 
> My gut feeling at this point is that by the end of the semester (a few
> weeks) I could get some of the primary MPI-1.2 API calls up and
> running. Since I've never worked with the C FFI before though, I could
> be totally wrong.
> 
> Does this sound like a three week task?

Actually, it may be even simpler than that.  For example, the OCaml MPI interface has the useful feature that any OCaml value that can be serialized (write and read are the analogous Scheme functions) can be sent and received over the MPI channels.  You might start there---with a single (mpi-send ...), (mpi-recv ...), etc, functions that just write to a string, ship the string, and then read from the string.  That shouldn't take but a few hours.  

Once you've got that in place, it might be enough for your course; the only reason to go to something specialized (e.g. (mpi-send-flvector ...) or something) is if the performance of the simple thing is intolerable for you.

Will