[Swift-devel] user guide work

Tue May 19 10:49:05 CDT 2015

Thanks, Lorenzo - this is very useful feedback.

We have some good documentation for 0.96.0 in progress, and will welcome 
further feedback, testing and improvements on it once its posted for 
comment.

- Mike

On 5/19/15 9:25 AM, Lorenzo Pesce wrote:
> I will throw in my useless 2 cents. I have been part of five or six swift based projects
> all involving what I would call large computations (at least a million core hours, usually tens of terabytes of data).
>
> In my experience:
> 1) The basic variables are all we ever needed.
> 2) The basic control loops is all we ever needed even if some more complex ones could have been handy (they just weren’t there when I started).
> 3) All the file system trickeries known to the devil and his friends are absolutely necessary. I never found a project that didn’t end up chocking on its data.
> 4) All the tricks for dealing intelligently with staging of data and code and “offloading” control are essential to avoid the hatred of the system administrators and other users.
> 5) A very clear understanding of where Swift is robust and where it isn’t are very important because nobody likes to have a 300 node run come crashing down on you creating an infestation of zombies that eventually might have forced Beagle’s admin to reboot. This is not criticism, I participated heavily in writing that script, so I am on the accused team.
>
> I can try to be more helpful, if you want me to.
>
> I have worked on a number of parallel projects, where essentially the same workflow was implemented with and without swift and both teams played to win. That is one paper I plan to write some day…
>
>
>> On May 18, 2015, at 3:27 PM, Ketan Maheshwari <ketan at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>
>> I think a little bit of both.  A brief overview of important things
>> with examples in chapter 1. Then, topics like "Task Parallel
>> Computing" or "Many Task Computing" may cover foreach, futures and
>> task parallelism as implemented in Swift. Then, a chapter like "File
>> I/O" may cover the mappers, etc. Then a topic like operators and
>> variables may bring in more of the language reference in that
>> describing types, structs, etc. Next may be builtin functions.
>> Followed by a chapter on Compute sites which covers Resource and data
>> managers, remote access and providers and such.
>>
>> So, to elaborate here is a rough outline I have in mind:
>>
>> Chap 1. Swift Overview
>> -- Importance of Swift
>> -- Swift example 1
>>    -- hello world, description, concept show in this example
>> -- Swift example 2
>>    -- Run an app functions, describe importance of app functions
>> -- Swift example 3
>>    -- Do file mappings, describe mappers
>> -- Swift example 4
>>   -- Do foreach loop, describe foreach
>> -- Swift example 5 (if needed)
>>
>> Chap 2. Many Task Computing in Swift
>> -- Parallelism in DAGs
>> -- Futures
>> -- foreach loop and variants
>> -- iterate
>>
>> Chap 3. File I/O
>> -- File types
>> -- Simple file def
>> -- Complex Mappers
>> -- Read and Write to Files
>>
>> Chap 4. Variables and Operators
>> -- types
>> -- structs
>> -- import
>>
>> Chap 5. User defined and Builtin functions
>> -- string
>> -- numerical
>> -- stat
>> -- math
>>
>> Chap 6. Swift providers
>> -- Coasters
>> -- Data providers
>> -- Compute Providers
>>
>> Chap 6. Remote compute sites
>> -- Modes of running
>>
>> Appendix A. Swift Grammar in BNF
>> Appendix B. A table of Swift conf options
>> Appendix C. Swift cheatsheet
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Mihael Hategan <hategan at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2015-05-18 at 13:27 -0500, Ketan Maheshwari wrote:
>>>> I think Swift is a special purpose language where ~20% of features are
>>>> used for ~80% of cases. Consequently, providing a K&R style language
>>>> manual might not be the most valuable thing for a user to read. It
>>>> also runs a risk of coming across as a general purpose language which
>>>> may mislead readers.
>>>>
>>>> I think, a document structure where the important features (app and
>>>> builtin functions, variables and mappers (with examples)) are
>>>> highlighted in the early parts and details such as variable scope,
>>>> expressions, operators etc. are described in the middle and concluded
>>>> with sites specific details might serve well.
>>> You mean like a brief overview of important things / tutorial in the
>>> beginning?
>>>
>>> Or do you mean that the language reference should not have a bottom-up
>>> structure, starting with the simple/primary concepts and building up
>>> from that?
>>>
>>> Mihael
>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Ketan
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Mihael Hategan <hategan at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> Mike pointed out that I should probably post a link to what I'm trying
>>>>> to do with the user guide just in case things are going awfully wrong.
>>>>> So here it is:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~hategan/ug/ug/ug.html
>>>>>
>>>>> Mike mention K&R a number of times and I think I like that general idea.
>>>>> The above, so far, is a mix between K&R Chapter 2 and Appendix A.
>>>>>
>>>>> The main idea is to keep things concise by separating parallelism
>>>>> behaviour from what a program actually does. In that sense, one would
>>>>> first describe the language, and then go into the details of how a
>>>>> particular implementation goes about running programs.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not particularly opposed to starting with a brief tutorial in the
>>>>> spirit of K&R Chapter 1.
>>>>>
>>>>> Mihael
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Swift-devel mailing list
>>>>> Swift-devel at ci.uchicago.edu
>>>>> https://lists.ci.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swift-devel
>>>
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-- 
Michael Wilde
Mathematics and Computer Science          Computation Institute
Argonne National Laboratory               The University of Chicago