itaps-parallel Notes from tutorial exercises

[Lori A. Diachin]

Hi Vitus and all,

I went through both tutorials this morning and overall think they're 
quite nice.  I like that you provide the basics here in the second 
exercise - it's a very nice bridge between Hello and Smooth.  I have a 
few minor notes (below).

As a general comment to everyone - do we have any tutorial exercises 
that aren't in C++?  I've gone through Hello, Load Balance and Smooth so 
far and I'm worried we'll give folks the wrong impression..   I see a .c 
file in the Hello directory -- would it be hard to add a fortran hello 
example?

Lori

Tutorial 1:

Exercise 2: It's not clear to me where the MPI communicator is 
initialized in the test file?  I assume it's COMM_WORLD, but you refer 
to 'initialized above' and I don't see it.  I assume it's in the Init 
function, but it might be helpful to make it more explicit

Exercise 3: Remind users how to get a string length; not all users will 
be c++ savy.

In general it's not always clear to me why I'm doing something, getting 
the parts, getting various handles, etc - is it needed for Zoltan?  If 
you can, it would be useful to add a sentence to the beginning of each 
exercise giving a bit of motivation for why I need to call this 
function.  It will help folks think through it themselves later..


Tutorial 2:

Might prefer to have different test file names in tutorial 1 and 
tutorial 2.... Actually, rather than switching files/directories, you 
could keep them all part of a single tutorial and just use the #define 
trick that Karen used in Hello.

Is .vtu a vtk format?  I'm not familiar with it and was surprised to see 
.vtu's... you might want to comment on what to expect in the notes for 
Exercise 1


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