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

MPI-Vector-IO: Parallel I/O and Partitioning for Geospatial Vector Data

In recent times, geospatial datasets are growing in terms of size, complexity and heterogeneity. High performance systems are needed to analyze such data to produce actionable insights in an efficient manner. For polygonal a.k.a vector datasets, operations such as I/O, data partitioning, communication, and load balancing becomes challenging in a cluster environment. In this work, we present MPI-Vector-IO 1 , a parallel I/O library that we have designed using MPI-IO specifically for partitioning and reading irregular vector data formats such as Well Known Text. It makes MPI aware of spatial data, spatial primitives and provides support for spatial data types embedded within collective computation and communication using MPI message-passing library. These abstractions along with parallel I/O support are useful for parallel Geographic Information System (GIS) application development on HPC platforms

Design and implementation of Java bindings in Open MPI

This paper describes the Java MPI bindings that have been included in the Open MPI distribution. Open MPI is one of the most popular implementations of MPI, the Message-Passing Interface, which is the predominant programming paradigm for parallel applications on distributed memory computers. We have added Java support to Open MPI, exposing MPI functionality to Java programmers. Our approach is based on the Java Native Interface, and has similarities with previous efforts, as well as important differences. This paper serves as a reference for the application program interface, and in addition we provide details of the internal implementation to justify some of the design decisions. We also show some results to assess the performance of the bindings. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.We are indebted to Siegmar Grog for his exhaustive testing of the Java bindings. We also thank Ralph Castain for helping in the integration of the Java bindings in the Open MPI infrastructure. The NPB-MPJ benchmarks used in Section 5 were kindly provided by Guillermo Lopez Taboada. The first two authors were supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under project number TIN2013-41049-P.Vega Gisbert, O.; Román Moltó, JE.; Squyres, JM. (2016). Design and implementation of Java bindings in Open MPI. Parallel Computing. 59:1-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parco.2016.08.004S1205