What Platforms are Targets for Implementation?



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What Platforms are Targets for Implementation?

The attractiveness of the message-passing paradigm at least partially stems from its wide portability. Programs expressed this way may run on distributed-memory multicomputers, shared-memory multiprocessors, networks of workstations, and combinations of all of these. The paradigm will not be made obsolete by architectures combining the shared- and distributed-memory views, or by increases in network speeds. Thus, it should be both possible and useful to implement this standard on a great variety of machines, including those ``machines'' consisting of collections of other machines, parallel or not, connected by a communication network.

The interface is suitable for use by fully general Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data (MIMD) programs, or Multiple Program, Multiple Data (MPMD) programs, where each process follows a distinct execution path through the same code, or even executes a different code. It is also suitable for those written in the more restricted style of Single Program, Multiple Data (SPMD), where all processes follow the same execution path through the same program. Although no explicit support for threads is provided, the interface has been designed so as not to prejudice their use. With this version of MPI no support is provided for dynamic spawning of tasks; such support is expected in future versions of MPI; see Section gif.

MPI provides many features intended to improve performance on scalable parallel computers with specialized interprocessor communication hardware. Thus, we expect that native, high-performance implementations of MPI will be provided on such machines. At the same time, implementations of MPI on top of standard Unix interprocessor communication protocols will provide portability to workstation clusters and heterogeneous networks of workstations. Several proprietary, native implementations of MPI, and public domain, portable implementation of MPI are now available. See Section gif for more information about MPI implementations.



Jack Dongarra
Fri Sep 1 06:16:55 EDT 1995