Daniel Holmes's blog

The MPI 3.1 standard, a minor update to the existing MPI 3.0 Standard, was ratified last week at the latest MPI Forum meeting. 

Following my presentation about McMPI at the EuroMPI 2013 conference last week, some people asked me to post the slides. The presentation and the associated paper give a brief introduction to the McMPI software and quickly cover some of my thoughts about threading in MPI.

Have you ever wanted to send a message using MPI to a specific thread in a multi-threaded MPI process? With the current MPI Standard, there is no way to identify one thread from another. The whole MPI process has a single rank in each communicator.

This article originally appeared in the Cisco blog by Jeff Squires and was written while I was undertaking a PhD before I joined EPCC as a member of staff. I thought it would be of interest to folks reading this blog.

My PhD involved building a message passing library using C#; not accessing an existing MPI library from C# code but creating a brand new MPI library written entirely in pure C#. The result is McMPI (Managed-code MPI), which is compliant with MPI-1 – as far as it can be given that there are no language bindings for C# in the MPI Standard. It also has reasonably good performance in micro-benchmarks for latency and bandwidth both in shared-memory and distributed-memory.