Abstract
Parallel programming models on large-scale systems require a scalable system for managing the processes that make up the execution of a parallel program. The process-management system must be able to launch millions of processes quickly when starting a parallel program and must provide mechanisms for the processes to exchange the information needed to enable them communicate with each other. MPICH2 and its derivatives achieve this functionality through a carefully defined interface, called PMI, that allows different process managers to interact with the MPI library in a standardized way. In this paper, we describe the features and capabilities of PMI. We describe both PMI-1, the current generation of PMI used in MPICH2 and all its derivatives, as well as PMI-2, the second-generation of PMI that eliminates various shortcomings in PMI-1. Together with the interface itself, we also describe a reference implementation for both PMI-1 and PMI-2 in a new process-management framework within MPICH2, called Hydra, and compare their performance in running MPI jobs with thousands of processes.
This work was supported in part by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract #DE-AC02-06CH11357; by the DOE grant #DE-FG02-08ER25835; and by the National Science Foundation under grant #0702182.
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Balaji, P. et al. (2010). PMI: A Scalable Parallel Process-Management Interface for Extreme-Scale Systems. In: Keller, R., Gabriel, E., Resch, M., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in the Message Passing Interface. EuroMPI 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6305. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15646-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15646-5_4
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