HTML version of Scripted Foils prepared 11 November 1996

Foil 6 Some Difficulties with MPI

From CPS615-Initial Lecture on MPI ending with discussion of basic MPI_SEND Delivered Lectures of CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- 31 October 96. by Geoffrey C. Fox *
Secs 407.5
1 Kitchen Sink has 129 functions and each has many arguments
  • This completeness is strength and weakness!
  • Hard to implement efficiently and hard to learn
2 It is not a complete operating environment and does not have ability to create and spawn processes etc.
3 PVM is previous dominant approach
  • It is very simple with much less functionality than MPI
  • However it runs on essentially all machines including workstation clusters
  • Further it is complete albeit simple operating environment
4 MPI outside distributed computing world with HTTP of the Web, ATM protocols and systems like ISIS from Cornell
5 However it does look as though MPI is being adopted as general messaging system by parallel computer vendors

Table Font Size


© Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Fri Aug 15 1997