Minutes 10 April 2006

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.