The Downside: Parallel Software Flaws

March 1997 / International Features / Mainstreaming Parallel Computing / The Downside: Parallel Software Flaws

Europort was not always a pleasant meeting of parallels. Some developers described the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) message-passing library as unstable and unreliable. Other developers felt release updates were issued too frequently. Several consortia report ed that PVM didn't fully support C++ features on some platforms, so they had to spend time programming around missing functions.
Most of the programmers reported that the debugging facilities on the parallel reference platforms were in general unstable and inadequate; that the documentation was poor; program initialization procedures were tricky an d inconsistent between platforms; and that it was hard to extract useful machine load information. Many also experienced implementation conflicts between versions of FORTRAN, MPI, C, and C++ for the various platforms.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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