MPI on the I-WAY: a wide-area, multimethod implementation of the message passing interface

Conference · Tue Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1996

OSTI ID:434326

Foster, I; Geisler, J; Tuecke, S

High-speed wide-area networks enable innovative applications that integrate geographically distributed computing, database, graphics, and networking resources. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) can be used as a portable, high-performance programming model for such systems. However, the wide-area environment introduces challenging problems for the MPI implementor, because of the heterogeneity of both the underlying physical infrastructure and the authentication and software environment at different sites. In this article, we describe an MPI implementation that incorporates solutions to these problems. This implementation, which was developed for the I-WAY distributed-computing experiment, was constructed by layering MPICH on the Nexus multithreaded runtime system. Nexus provides automatic configuration mechanisms that can be used to select and configure authentication, process creation, and communication mechanisms in heterogeneous systems.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States); National Science Foundation, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: W-31109-ENG-38
• OSTI ID: 434326
• Report Number(s): ANL/MCS-P--595-0596; CONF-9607124--4; ON: DE97000691; CNN: Contract CCR-8809615
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
ALGORITHMS
COMPUTER NETWORKS
DATA TRANSMISSION
DESIGN
PERFORMANCE TESTING