A Case Study of MPI: Portable and Efficient Libraries*

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the performance achieved by several implementations of the recently defined Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. In particular, performance results for different implementations of the broadcast operation are analyzed and compared on the Delta, Paragon, SP1 and CM5. 1 Introduction For the past several years, members of the Parallel Research on Invariant Subspace Methods (PRISM) project have been investigating scalable parallel eigensolvers for distributed memory systems [1, 3]. The ultimate objective of this research is the development of portable and efficient libraries for this fundamental numerical linear algebra kernel. In the course of our work, we, like many other library developers, have been faced with many issues relating to portable programming. Previously, a notable obstacle to library development was the lack of standardization in message passing, from both a programming and a functional point of view. This lack of standardization made it dif..