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PALM_SP
The design of the PALM coupler proved
to be ambitious since the beginning. The PALM Team had to conceive a
portable and effective software based on the state of the art parallel
computing technologies.
After a thourough technical review, the
standard message passing library MPI2 was choosen as the long term
solution, but, at the end of the 90's, just a few implementations were
available but still not robust.
Since it was necessary to check the effectiveness of the formalism and
of the communication scheme and to test different solutions for the
interfaces, a prototype based on the MPI1 message passing library was
implemented. Since MPI1 complies only with the Single Program Multiple
Data parallel paradigm, the coupled entities have to be coded as
subroutines of a single overall program. In order to grant the best
independency, the Multiple Program Multiple Data pradigm was emulated,
but still some restrictions applied.
The prototype reached a fully working
configuration, and it was used in full size real applications with the
name of PALM_RESEARCH afterwards renamed PALM_SP.
These experiences provided a very important feedback and some features
were added or optimized in the design of the final implementation.
Even if PALM_SP is not
officially maintained anymore, it is still used for some legacy
applications.
