chatr

I was reminiscing about some good old parallel code I found while cleaning up one of my computers the other day. It reminded me of how cool it was to get down with multiple processors when you need to do a lot of computing. I started looking to see if there were any Ruby implementations for MPI which was my favorite library to use. I stumbled across the mpi_ruby library but was sad to see that it seemed to have died out quite a while ago. The last development on it was done in '01 and consequently only worked with Ruby 1.6.4. I tried emailing the people that were in charge of the project according to the info on the site, but all the emails just bounced back.

I spent a little bit of time and made some rather trivial modifications to the code and got it working with Ruby 1.8.6. It should work with 1.8.x, but I haven't tried it with other versions yet. For all of you HPC and math geeks out there here's a good chance to help out. You can have all of the qualities of parallel goodness along with the elegance of ruby. Give it a shot. You can find the installation instructions over at http://opensource.thinkrelevance.com/wiki/mpi_ruby. The code itself can be found at https://opensource.thinkrelevance.com/svn/incubator/mpi_ruby.

If you were part of the original project it would be great to hear from you. I would love to keep things going and would like to see what other people are doing with Ruby and MPI.