Re: Perl and OpenMPI

[jsquyres]

I am unfamiliar with those modules, but do have a larger question to ask...

The MPI Forum is currently working on MPI 3.0. As part of that process, there is a half-baked proposal about better supporting higher-level languages such as Perl. To be clear: it is unlikely that the Forum will develop official perl bindings for MPI; rather, it seeks to ensure that those who want to create higher-level language bindings would have the appropriate hooks and tools to do so (from a standards perspective). Such issues became clear when the Boost.MPI class library was developed (and other similar projects, such as MPI.NET).

So my question to the Perl Monks is: what does MPI need to provide to enable someone to write "good" / Perl-ish / Perl-native / Perl-natural MPI functionality? (note that such functionality does *not* need to be a 1:1 mapping to the underlying C MPI bindings)

A sub question: is there something that Open MPI can provide to better support higher-level language/Perl bindings? (I'm one of the core developers of Open MPI)

The MPI-3.0 question will likely take a long time to answer (it will be quite a while before MPI-3.0 is finalized). But perhaps there's something interesting / useful that we can do in Open MPI to help Perl MPI functionality in the not-distant future...?

Thanks!