Scalability of communicators and groups in MPI

As the number of cores inside compute clusters continues to grow, the scalability of MPI (Message Passing Interface) is important to ensure that programs can continue to execute on an ever-increasing number of cores. One important scalability issue for MPI is the current implementation of communicators and groups. Communicators and groups are an integral part of MPI and play an essential role in the design and use of libraries. It is challenging to create an MPI implementation to support communicators and groups to scale to the hundreds of thousands of processes that are possible in today's clusters. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of techniques to support the scalability of communicators and groups in MPI. We have designed and implemented a fine-grain version of MPI, called FG-MPI based on MPICH2, that allows thousands of full-fledged MPI processes inside an operating system process. Using FG-MPI we can create hundreds and thousands of MPI processes, which all...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Humaira Kamal, Seyed M. Mirtaheri, Alan Wagner
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPDC 2010, MPI Processes, Scalability, Scalability Issues