Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Floating point arithmetic

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Russell Standish wrote:

> You said that Java has an MPI interface too - perhaps that doesn't
> work too well?


James Marshall wrote:

> http://aspen.ucs.indiana.edu/pss/HPJava/mpiJava.html
>
> As I say, I haven't used it. It's a JNI interface to the MPI libs though.

My point is that high level interfaces like RMI often don't come for 
free.  Obviously (laugh), I'm a big believer in JNI and similar foreign 
function interfaces.   I don't see a reason why MPI for Java (like 
Swarm) couldn't, in principle, work well (especially in a GCJ-like 
framework), but that's changing the argument.

Homogeneity is nice, but there will always be some new technology that 
comes along that aims to subsume everything else.  Sometimes it is good 
to jump, othertimes it is not.   [And no, in retrospect, I don't think 
rewriting Swarm in Java would have been a good jump.  In fact, had I 
known it was going to be redundant, I would have spent the time 
developing something more radical.  Currently, the HPCS languages Chapel 
and Fortress look interesting but I don't work on agent-based modeling 
infrastructure anymore so it is of course just talk.  Repast's work with 
.NET is also interesting to me.]