MSR Ensemble for Python (MSRE-Py) Version 0.9, Prototype Alpha

Authors:
Edmund S. L. Lam      sllam@qatar.cmu.edu
Iliano Cervesato      iliano@cmu.edu

* Development of MSRE-Py is funded by the Qatar National Research Fund as project NPRP 09-667-1-100 (Effective Programming for Large Distributed Ensembles)


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Introduction
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This is the prototype version of MSR Ensemble (MSRE) for Python, a rule-based, declarative distributed programming language, based on multiset rewriting.
MSRE is implemented on top of MPI libraries in Python and performs constraint rewriting in a decentralized manner.

For more information on MSRE, see our PPDP'13 paper "Decentralized Execution of Constraint Handling Rules for Ensembles", which can be found 
at http://www.qatar.cmu.edu/~sllam/my_papers/published/SLLAM_ppdp13.pdf .


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Requirements
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System Applications:
   - Python 2.7
   - MPI Distribution, preferably MPI-2
   - System development libraries for Python and MPI

Non-standard Python packages:
   - mpi4py (MPI binding libraries for Python http://mpi4py.scipy.org/)
   - ply (Python Lex-Yacc http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/)

* Currently only tested on Ubuntu, but do try on other platforms and feel free to report any bugs or issues to us!

Having problems getting the above? Try the following steps:

-- To obtain MPI system libraries
sudo apt-get install mpich2
sudo apt-get install mpi-default-dev

-- To obtain Python developement libraries
sudo apt-get install python-dev

-- If you don't have python 'easy_install' tools
sudo apt-get install python_setuptools

-- To obtain non-standard python packages
sudo easy_install ply
sudo easy_install mpi4py

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Instructions
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Once you have fulfilled the above system requirements, you can proceed to install msre: In command prompt, run 'make install', 
this will install MSRE into your default python installation as the python module 'msr_ensemble'.

To compile a MSRE program, invoke the MSRE compiler by running 'msre <.msr file name>', this will create a number of .py files.

To run the MSRE compilation over MPI environment, run 'mpiexec -n <num of ranks> python <.py MSRE compilation>'.

Once execution of all processes have ended, output of each process will be written into 'output.log'. Currently, this is
the only way program output can be observed.

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TODOs
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MSRE-Py is still work in progress and might not be as yet, your perfect distributed programming experience. As such, we wish you
will be patient with the awkward and odd little wrong things that MSRE might do. Please do report any bugs or issues that you encounter.
We welcome any comments on how to improve the MSRE programming experience.

Here is a list of things which we are currently working on, to improve MSRE:

     - Better lexing error reports
     - Completing the type-checking facilities
     - Modularity
     - Additional language features
     - Drop the source-to-source compilation and build a VM already! =P