Self-Consistent MPI Performance Guidelines

Message passing using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is at present the most widely adopted framework for programming parallel applications for distributed-memory and clustered parallel systems. For reasons of (universal) implementability, the MPI standard does not state any specific performance guarantees, but users expect MPI implementations to deliver good and consistent performance in the sense of efficient utilization of the underlying parallel (communication) system. For performance portability reasons, users also naturally desire communication optimizations performed on one parallel platform with one MPI implementation to be preserved when switching to another MPI implementation on another platform. We address the problem of ensuring performance consistency and portability by formulating performance guidelines and conditions that are desirable for good MPI implementations to fulfill. Instead of prescribing a specific performance model (which may be realistic on some sys...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Jesper Larsson Träff, William D. Gropp, Rajeev Thakur
• Keywords: MPI Implementations, MPI Standard, Performance, TPDS 2010