[petsc-dev] PETSc object management of MPI communicators

[Jed Brown]

Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
>    We do this because it is necessary to do this (or something
>    similar), for any MPI based library. I am hoping that MPI will be
>    replaced by another programming model before it is necessary to get
>    the wider community to understand why it is necessary to do this
>    and how we do it :-(

It has been 20 years and most libraries still create wrapper classes of
some sort, which are much worse.

>    Perhaps we should pull out the code into its own little library
>    that can be used by the various library writing groups?

That might make sense.  Probably nobody wants to depend on such a thing
as an external library, but they could copy a single source file into
their tree (or git subtree merge it in).

>    There are many things we could/should do, but how much time to we
>    want to spend on dying legacies :-)

I'll plan for an MPI replacement when people designing such systems take
the effort to understand MPI.  So far, they are building sand castles
and talking about how metals and composites won't scale as construction
and aerospace materials.
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