Report on the BSPlib Questionnaire Responses

The Questionnaire was issued in February 1998 to solicit BSP Worldwide members' views about establishing BSPlib as an international industry standard. At the time of launch it was stated:

The report is presented in two parts:

• Voting on the proposal to establish BSPlib as an international industry standard is reported in the Voting Report.
• The general statistical background to these votes is presented in the Background Report.

What Happens Now?

The next part of the process involves bringing implementations of the BSPlib proposal to the attention of as wide a range of parallel programmers as possible. Only by creating a large and widespread community of users can we move to the position of having a de facto standard that will attract support from computer manufacturers and other third party supplies of programming software.

We would then be ready to consider formal standardisation procedures.

BSP Worldwide members who want to see BSPlib standardised can best assist this process by taking every opportunity to point out to others that it provides a better way to do parallel programming.

Thank you!

The Questionnaire responses also supplied very useful feedback to the team at Oxford Parallel which has, over the last three years, with support from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council GR/K40765, been providing implementations of the evolving BSPlib proposals for a wide variety of machines and supplementing these with practical tools for the design and performance tuning of parallel applications. All of us at Oxford Parallel thank respondees for their detailed, constructive comments and encouragment.