A Draft Standard for Message Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment

J. J. Dongarra
Department of Computer Science
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-1301
U. S. A.
R. Hempel
Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH
P. O. Box 1316
D-5205 Sankt Augustin 1
Germany
A. J. G. Hey
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton, SO17 1BJ
U. K.
D. W. Walker
Mathematical Sciences Section
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
P. O. Box 2008
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6367
U. S. A.

Abstract

This paper describes Message Passing Interface 1 (MPI1), a proposed library interface standard for supporting point-to-point message passing. The intended standard will be provided with Fortran 77 and C interfaces, and will form the basis of a standard high level communication environment featuring collective communication and data distribution transformations. The standard proposed here provides blocking and nonblocking message passing between pairs of processes, with message selectivity by source process and message type. Provision is made for noncontiguous messages. Context control provides a convenient means of avoiding message selectivity conflicts between different phases of an application. The ability to form and manipulate process groups permits task parallelism to be exploited.

J. J. Dongarra, R. Hempel, A. J. G. Hey and D. W. Walker, A Draft Standard for Message Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment, in Parallel Supercomputing in Atmospheric Science: Proceedings of the Fifth ECNWF Workshop on the Use of Parallel Processors in Meteorology, held in Reading, U. K., November 23-27, 1992. Eds. Geerd-R. Hoffman and T. Kauranne, published by World Scientific Press, 1993. This is an earlier version of a technical report.