Parallel Programming with MPI

Rating:
Summary: The best Introductory book
Review: --------------------- Serious Part of the review-------------------------

Parcheco in this book is carving the path for Parallel programming enthusiasts to follow towards a sound understanding of MPI 1.X. If this book is being adviced as a basic or supplementary book for starters, in an undergraduate course where a sound knowledge of C is required, then no excuse can be found for not being able to tackle an excercise like the following, after 1 week of studying the book.

P0 P1

0 0|0 0

0 0|0 0

where P0 must send the last column from P0 and receive the first column of P1... You simply pack them and send them with an MPI_Type_vector derived data type...

Obtain this book it is what people describe as a "value for money"

----------- Non Serious Part of the review -------------------

All you smart undergrads can take this book before your semester starts and be ready and cool in 2 weeks to simply just sit in the class listening the Proff explaining the obvious...and of course you can take a look at this gordious lady sitting in front of you without being afraid of missing an important concept if you distract a minute your mind...take your revenge from the "brainless" football player she is being dating with... :-)

Rating:
Summary: Comments for Fortran Users
Review:

As the book description indicates, the text is based on the C language. The Fortran MPI function calls are slightly different (syntatically) than the C equivalents. Fortran users should be aware that these differences are not discussed in the text. However, the sample programs from the text are available in Fortran from the author's web page (referenced in the book).

Aside from this, Parallel Programming With MPI is an easy reading book which introduces the material through working examples. The book also contains a nice introduction to high performance computing and optimization issues. I still have a lot to learn , but I'm glad I bought it!

Rating:
Summary: The best Introductory book
Review: A necessary volume for anyone working with MPI. After reading the books by Snir and Gropp this is a great follow-on which demystifies a few complex concepts in MPI.

Rating:
Summary: A necessary volume
Review: A necessary volume for anyone working with MPI. After reading the books by Snir and Gropp this is a great follow-on which demystifies a few complex concepts in MPI.

Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile
Review: A well-organized, methodical presentation of a complex subject.

Rating:
Summary: Yes I have found myself doing that
Review: I have often found myself checking out the gordious lady sitting in front of me after having read this book. I had a Java project to re-write MPI Bcast, Reduce, and Barrier using the oppposite implementations that MPI already had. i.e. Bcast done in MSB, and so on. I had to come up to speed very quickly and this allowed me to do so.

Rating:
Summary: Very insightful!
Review: This book is a great introduction not only to MPI but to parallel programming itself. Initially, one learns essential concepts of parallel programming, including hardware and network topologies. An MPI version of ``Hello World!'' gently introduces the reader to the mechanics of running MPI programs (if you haven't set up your parallel computing environment yet, this may well be the most time consuming chapter of the book!) In what follows, the author lays out the basics of each topic in parallel programming, followed by MPI-specific details (i.e. which MPI function is used in that situation). Particularly worthy of praise is the example-driven approach, whereby in each chapter a problem is presented (like numerical integration or matrix multiplication), and the author shows how to solve them with techniques taught in that chapter. Some problems are rehashed in other sections/chapters, in order to show different PP techniques to solve them. The book doesn't suffer from the black-box syndrome of hiding implementation details: the reader is usually shown the inner workings of, say, each communication technique, while being advised to use MPI's built-in functions instead of rolling out his own versions.

Topics covered include collective communication methods, I/O, debugging, design, performance, parallel algorithms and libraries, and advanced topics in communication. A handy appendix on MPI functions wraps up the book.

As an aside, I will be forever grateful to this book due to its clear exposition of the butterfly broadcast method, which helped me understand the Cooley-Tukey iterative version of the FFT (which uses the same butterfly idea), something I had been struggling with for a couple of years. I would have gladly bought the book for this explanation alone.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent, concise walk-through of MPI.
Review: This book is an excellent walk-through of MPI programming, with extensive coverage of more general topics in parallel programming. It makes an excellent companion to a course on parallel programming, and is also just generally a good read.

Rating:
Summary: Very thorough
Review: Very seldom do I find a programming book being as detail as this one. Definitely worth reading if you are new to MPI.