History for Minutes 10 April 2006

changed:
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Present: Shane, Andre, Karl, Greg, Poul, Travis

Apologies: Chris, Peter

An audio recording of the meeting can be "downloaded":ftp://ftp.bioeng.auckland.ac.nz/cmiss/opencmiss/cmiss-meeting-100406.ogg

* Recording

  Shane is trying out recording the meeting with his phone so that the meeting
  doesn't need to be recorded realtime from the dictaphone.

* Parallelization investigation

  Karl: Surprised by lack of libraries to provide helpful tools for background
  communication (while computation continues).  Although some low level tools
  are available (RMA in MPI-2 is of note), higher level functions (e.g. of
  Zoltan) seem to be designed to have separate communication and computation
  phases.

  Travis went to an iterative-solver conference in Colorado:

  * Kirk Jordan gave a presentation: Our group was one of three groups
    mentioned that intend to run on Blue Gene.  Another group was able to port
    existing MPI code to Blue Gene in 2 days.  Our group was mentioned as
    rewriting code.

  * A lot of people using !PETSc, Metis common.

  * No obvious higher-level package on top of MPI.  (MPI is the package the
    hardware vendors optimize for their platforms.)

* Job description

  Going through University processes.

* cmiss.org

  * wiki mail is working (through a work-around) thanks to Carey.

  * tracker bug notification still needs attention.

  Shane: Who is going to learn how to do things and continue when Carey is
  gone.


* Fieldml:

  Poul: 

  * Tidied up some differences between element and ensemble.

  * Changes to ordering: parameter maps has moved from ensemble field to
    ensemble field function.

  * Has some examples including serialized form.

  * Removed requirement for some naming (using raw index instead) to reduce
    verbosity of files: ensemble field parameters, basis functions, field
    parameter map.

  * Priority is to look at organizing field parameters in arbitrary ways
    (e.g. at a node).

  * Hanging node example picks up parameters at hanging node from adjacent
    nodes.

  * Ensemble field parameters maps had 3 types: general, real, boolean.  Now
    folded into one list of linear maps (with different types for different
    elements).

  Greg: Is an ensemble field parameters linear maps required for every element?
  How does templating help?

  * Shane: templating may be usable with an offset, scale factors may be able
    to be extracted.

  Travis: Are we still considering using cmgui to implement fieldml?

  * Shane: cmgui would be ported to implement new fieldml ideas.  If we use
    cmgui initially then that code could be ported at the same time.