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Towards Efficient Execution of MPI Applications on the Grid: Porting and Optimization Issues

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Abstract

The message passing interface (MPI) is a standard used by many parallel scientific applications. It offers the advantage of a smoother migration path for porting applications from high performance computing systems to the Grid. In this paper Grid-enabled tools and libraries for developing MPI applications are presented. The first is MARMOT, a tool that checks the adherence of an application to the MPI standard. The second is PACX-MPI, an implementation of the MPI standard optimized for Grid environments. Besides the efficient development of the program, an optimal execution is of paramount importance for most scientific applications. We therefore discuss not only performance on the level of the MPI library, but also several application specific optimizations, e.g., for a sparse, parallel equation solver and an RNA folding code, like latency hiding, prefetching, caching and topology-aware algorithms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Stuttgart, Germany and Innovative Computing Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Rainer Keller, Edgar Gabriel, Bettina Krammer, Matthias S. Müller & Michael M. Resch

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  1. Rainer Keller
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  2. Edgar Gabriel
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  3. Bettina Krammer
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  4. Matthias S. Müller
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  5. Michael M. Resch
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Keller, R., Gabriel, E., Krammer, B. et al. Towards Efficient Execution of MPI Applications on the Grid: Porting and Optimization Issues. Journal of Grid Computing 1, 133–149 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:GRID.0000024071.12177.91

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:GRID.0000024071.12177.91

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