Posts Tagged with 'mpi 2'

This is the third column introducing the basics of Unified Parallel C (UPC). UPC, Co-Array Fortran, and other new productivity-oriented programming languages are designed to simplify parallel programming and code maintenance.

Unified Parallel C provides shortcuts and conveniences for parallel codes. Here’s another example.

Designed for high-performance computing on large-scale parallel machines, including Beowulf-style clusters, Unified Parallel C provides a uniform programming model for both shared and distributed memory hardware.

Traditional interprocess communication requires cooperation and synchronization between sender and receiver. MPI-2's new remote memory access features allow one process to update or interrogate the memory of another, hence the name one-sided communication. Here's a hands-on guide.

Last month's "Extreme Linux" introduced MPI-2, the latest Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. MPI has become the preferred programming interface for data exchange -- called message passing -- for parallel, scientific programs. MPI has evolved since the MPI-1.0 standard was released in May 1994. The MPI-1.1 standard, produced in 1995, was a significant advance, and the MPI-2 standard clarifies and corrects the MPI-1.1 standard while preserving forward compatibility with MPI-1.1. A valid MPI-1.1 program is a valid MPI-2 program.

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become the application programming interface (API) of choice for data exchange among processes in parallel scientific programs. While Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is still a viable message passing system offering features not available in MPI, it's often not the first choice for developers seeking vendor-supported APIs based on open standards. Of course, standards evolve, and the MPI standard is no different.

Most programs written for distributed memory, parallel computers, including Beowulf clusters, utilize the Message Passing Interface (MPI) or Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) programming interfaces to exchange data or messages among processes. In the past, this column has presented many of the fundamentals of message passing and has shown a number of programming examples using both MPI and PVM. Last month's column focused on the master/slave model of parallelism using MPI, and introduced the MPI_Probe() routine. This month, let's discuss another advanced feature of MPI: how to use derived data types.