Learning from the Success of MPI

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been extremely successful as a portable way to program high-performance parallel computers. This success has occurred in spite of the view of many that message passing is difficult and that other approaches, including automatic parallelization and directive-based parallelism, are easier to use. This paper argues that MPI has succeeded because it addresses all of the important issues in providing a parallel programming model.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Extending Message Passing Interface Windows to Storage

This work presents an extension to MPI supporting the one-sided communication model and window allocations in storage. Our design transparently integrates with the current MPI implementations, enabling applications to target MPI windows in storage, memory or both simultaneously, without major modifications. Initial performance results demonstrate that the presented MPI window extension could potentially be helpful for a wide-range of use-cases and with low-overhead

MPICH-G2: A Grid-Enabled Implementation of the Message Passing Interface

Application development for distributed computing "Grids" can benefit from tools that variously hide or enable application-level management of critical aspects of the heterogeneous environment. As part of an investigation of these issues, we have developed MPICH-G2, a Grid-enabled implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across multiple computers, at the same or different sites, using the same commands that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus Toolkit for authentication, authorization, resource allocation, executable staging, and I/O, as well as for process creation, monitoring, and control. Various performance-critical operations, including startup and collective operations, are configured to exploit network topology information. The library also exploits MPI constructs for performance management; for example, the MPI communicator construct is used for application-level discovery of, and adaptation to, both network topology and network quality-of-service mechanisms. We describe the MPICH-G2 design and implementation, present performance results, and review application experiences, including record-setting distributed simulations.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

The communication semantics of the message passing interface

technical reportThe Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard is a natural language document that describes a software library for interprocess communication. Automatic reasoning about the reactive nature of programs communicating via MPI libraries is not possible without also analizing the library being used. Many distributed programs that use MPI are relatively brief compared to the libraries that implement MPI. A formal specification of the communication semantics of the MPI standard (i) enables modular automatic reasoning of MPI based parallel programs independent of the library implementation, (ii) provides a mathematically precise declaration of the natural language intent of the MPI specification, (iii) enables mathematical reasoning about libraries that implement the standard, and (iv) allows for reasoning about the standard itself. We have created such a specification of the point to point operations and present it in this report. We also discuss some preliminary efforts to accomplish (i) above

Parallel Performance of MPI Sorting Algorithms on Dual-Core Processor Windows-Based Systems

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is widely used to implement parallel programs. Although Windowsbased architectures provide the facilities of parallel execution and multi-threading, little attention has been focused on using MPI on these platforms. In this paper we use the dual core Window-based platform to study the effect of parallel processes number and also the number of cores on the performance of three MPI parallel implementations for some sorting algorithms

Exascale Message Passing Interface based Program Deadlock Detection

Deadlock detection is one of the main issues of software testing in High Performance Computing (HPC) and also inexascale computing areas in the near future. Developing and testing programs for machines which have millions of cores is not an easy task. HPC program consists of thousands (or millions) of parallel processes which need to communicate with each other in the runtime. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standard library which provides this communication capability and it is frequently used in the HPC. Exascale programs are expected to be developed using MPI standard library. For parallel programs, deadlock is one of the expected problems. In this paper, we discuss the deadlock detection for exascale MPI-based programs where the scalability and efficiency are critical issues. The proposed method detects and flags the processes and communication operations which are potential to cause deadlocks in a scalable and efficient manner. MPI benchmark programs were used to test the proposed method