The Apple Developer Connection Publishes Introduction to MPI Distributed Programming on Mac OS X

Today many developers are harnessing the power of multiple computers to solve CPU-intensive problems in scientific research, animation, and rendering. In particular, Apple's Xgrid makes it easier than ever to collect ad hoc resources into a personal supercomputer. Xgrid is especially well suited for "embarrassingly parallel" problems, which run the exact same code many times using different inputs (e.g., different random numbers for a Monte Carlo simulation, or different input files for finite element analysis). But, what if your problem can't easily be split up into numerous independent chunks? What if, in fact, the various processors need to be able to coordinate with each other and exchange data during a calculation? The solution is MPI, the Message Passing Interface, the topic of the latest ADC article, Introduction to MPI Distributed Programming on Mac OS X. [Bill Fox]