High Performance Computing Networking

Open MPI recently revamped its entire run-time parameter system (a.k.a., “MCA parameter system”) as part of its implementation effort for the “MPI_T” interface from MPI-3. The MPI_T interface is a standardized interface designed for MPI tools, but can be used by regular MPI a…

I’ve previously posted on “Why MPI is Good for You” (blog tag: why-mpi-is-good-for-you).  The short version is that it hides the typical application programmer from lots and lots of underlying network stuff; stuff that they really, really don’t want to be involved in. Here…

Today’s guest posting comes from Jesper Larsson Träff; he’s Faculty of Informatics, Institute of Information Systems in the Research Group for Parallel Computing at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Have you ever wondered why MPI is designed the way that it is?  The slides…

A fun scenario was proposed in the MPI Forum today.  What do you think this code will do? MPI_Comm comm, save; MPI_Request req; MPI_Init(NULL, NULL); MPI_Comm_dup(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &comm); MPI_Comm_rank(comm, &rank); save = comm; MPI_Isend(smsg, 4194304, MPI_CHAR, rank, 123, comm, &req); M…

I’ve been a bit remiss about posting recently; it’s conference-paper-writing season, folks — sorry. But I thought I’d mention that I’ll be speaking at the Midwest Open Source Software Convention (MOSSCon) this weekend. I’ll be talking about my work in Open MPI, Ha…

I’m very pleased to welcome a new member to the Cisco USNIC/MPI Team: Dave Goodell.  Welcome, Dave!  (today was his first day) Dave joins us from the MPICH team at Mathematics and Computer Science division at Argonne National Laboratory.…

In a prior blog post, I talked about latency analogies.  I compared levels of latencies to your home, your neighborhood, a far-away neighborhood, and another city.  I talked about these localities in terms of communication. Let’s extend that analogy to talk about data locality.…

The Cisco and Microsoft joint Cross-Animal Technology Project, a well-established player in the field of multi-species collaborative initiatives, is pleased to introduce its next project: a revolution in High Performance Computing (HPC): LOLCODE language bindings for the Message Passing Interface (M…

Multiple readers have told me that it is difficult for them to understand and/or visualize the effects of latency on their HPC applications, particularly in modern NUMA (non-uniform memory access) and NUNA (non-uniform network access) environments. Let’s breaks down the different levels of lat…