Using the Pilot Library to Teach Message-Passing Programming
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Message-passing is the staple of HPC codes, and MPI has long occupied the place of HPC's default programming paradigm, thus it would seem to be the natural choice for instructing undergraduates. Nonetheless, MPI is a low-level API, complex and tricky to use, with many pitfalls awaiting the inexperienced. The Pilot library was invented as an alternative HPC programming model for C and Fortran. Pilot-based codes, using a process/channel application architecture borrowed from Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), can avoid some categories of errors, and the Pilot library with its integrated deadlock detector provides extensive checking and diagnosis of usage problems, which is especially important for students running cluster programs in their typical low-visibility environment with limited debugging tools. This paper gives an overview of programming in Pilot, with its compact API of point-to-point and collective operations. It explains reasons for preferring it as an introductory message-passing technique, describes free resources available to the instructor, and relates experiences of using Pilot with undergraduates over five years, including student reactions. Pilot is now available as free and open source.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it