group(3)

NAME
group - The Group Library
 The group library provides three mechanisms for parallel execution and communication. These are:

Message Passing

The MessageGrp class is the ancestor for classes that provide the passing of messages between processes. There are three important specializations of this class:

ProcMessageGrp
    Provides a dummy MessageGrp for single processor case.

MPIMessageGrp
    Implements MessageGrp using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library.

ShmMessageGrp
    Implements MessageGrp using SysV Interprocess communication.

Due to the widespread acceptance of MPI and the large number of features that it supports, the MessageGrp specialization may one day be eliminated.

Distributed Shared Memory

The MemoryGrp class is the ancestor for classes that permit access to the memory in different processes, possible on difference machines. There are two important specializations of this class:

ProcMemoryGrp
    Provides a dummy MemoryGrp for single processor case.

MTMPIMemoryGrp
     This works reliably and efficiently, however, requires POSIX threads and a thread-safe MPI implementation.

Multi-Threading

The ThreadGrp class is the ancestor of classes that provide multiple-threads within a single address space. There are two important specializations of this class:

ProcThreadGrp
    Provides a dummy ThreadGrp for the single thread case.

PthreadThreadGrp
     This is a ThreadGrp that uses POSIX threads.