On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Hicham Mouline
MPI uses serialization to serialize user-defined types (you write the serialize template function). I don't know if MPI lets you choose if you want a binary archive or a text/xml archive.
Boost.MPI chooses the archive: its own specialized archive version. In general, with Boost.Serialization, the serialization functions you write are independent of the archive: they work equally well with a text/xml archive than with a binary archive. Boost.MPI exploits this and defines its own archive types to translate your classes into something that (C level) MPI can handle. You can influence the process to gain some more speed with types that directly map to MPI types, see the Boost.MPI manual: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_44_0/doc/html/mpi/tutorial.html#mpi.performa... Best regards, Riccardo -- Riccardo Murri Grid Computing Competence Centre, http://www.gc3.uzh.ch/ Organisch-Chemisches Institut, University of Zurich Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich (Switzerland) Tel: +41 44 635 4222 Fax: +41 44 635 6888