I’m a .NET developer, and I work in a large financial institution in London. I don’t think I can reveal who I am, but I won’t be posting anything work specific anyway, so I’m not too worried about concealing my identity.

Little Plastic Squares won’t be too much more than a collection of links and code snippets that people might find useful. Let’s kick off:

MPI (Message Passing Interface) for .NET: MPI is an alternative to request-response based cross-machine work distribution architectures that you often find running grids.

With MPI, you define the path that data takes as it travels through a set of grid nodes, as well as what actually happens on the node. When data gets to the node, some work happens, and the node knows which other node to send the result to.

MPI has been in academia for ages, and is one of those things that, because Moore’s law doesn’t work any more, the “real world” is starting to notice. cf Functional Programming, Transactional Memory.

This implemetation is nice because (1) it doesn’t force the developer to use the actual function-calls defined by the interface (“MPI_INIT” etc), and (2) it’s supported by Microsoft’s WinHPC suite.