Technologies and tools for high-performance distributed computing. Final report
- Department of Computer Science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL (US)
In this project we studied the practical use of the MPI message-passing interface in advanced distributed computing environments. We built on the existing software infrastructure provided by the Globus Toolkit{trademark}, the MPICH portable implementation of MPI, and the MPICH-G integration of MPICH with Globus. As a result of this project we have replaced MPICH-G with its successor MPICH-G2, which is also an integration of MPICH with Globus. MPICH-G2 delivers significant improvements in message passing performance when compared to its predecessor MPICH-G and was based on superior software design principles resulting in a software base that was much easier to make the functional extensions and improvements we did. Using Globus services we replaced the default implementation of MPI's collective operations in MPICH-G2 with more efficient multilevel topology-aware collective operations which, in turn, led to the development of a new timing methodology for broadcasts [8]. MPICH-G2 was extended to include client/server functionality from the MPI-2 standard [23] to facilitate remote visualization applications and, through the use of MPI idioms, MPICH-G2 provided application-level control of quality-of-service parameters as well as application-level discovery of underlying Grid-topology information. Finally, MPICH-G2 was successfully used in a number of applications including an award-winning record-setting computation in numerical relativity. In the sections that follow we describe in detail the accomplishments of this project, we present experimental results quantifying the performance improvements, and conclude with a discussion of our applications experiences. This project resulted in a significant increase in the utility of MPICH-G2.
- Research Organization:
- Department of Computer Science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research (ER) (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- FC02-99ER25398
- OSTI ID:
- 808724
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
A grid-enabled MPI : message passing in heterogeneous distributed computing systems.
Exploiting hierarchy in parallel computer networks to optimize collective operations performance