MPI-3

MPI-3.1! …not quite yet

The MPI Forum met for our quarterly meeting last week in Portland, Oregon. The main goal of the meeting was to pass the MPI-3.1 standard into law.  MPI-3.1 contains a bunch of errata from MPI-3.0, and a small number of new things.…

MPI 3.1: coming soon to an implementation near you

The next MPI Forum meeting will be in Portland, OR, USA, in early March. One of the major topics on the agenda will be voting on the MPI 3.1 standard. You might be wondering what’s new in MPI-3.1. I’m glad you asked.…

MPI-3.1

As you probably already know, the MPI-3.0 document was published in September of 2012. We even got a new logo for MPI-3.  Woo hoo! The MPI Forum has been busy working on both errata to MPI-3.0 (which will be collated and published as “MPI-3.1”) and all-new functionality for MPI-4.0. The…

Overlap of communication and computation (part 2)

In part 1 of this series, I discussed various peer-wise technologies and techniques that MPI implementations typically use for communication / computation overlap. MPI-3.0, published in 2012, forced a change in the overlap game. Specifically: most prior overlap work had been in the area of individua…

First public tools for the MPI_T interface in MPI-3.0

Today’s guest post is written by Tanzima Islam, Post Doctoral Researcher at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and Kathryn Mohror and Martin Schulz, Computer Scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The latest version of the MPI Standard, MPI 3.0, includes a new interface for tools: the MPI To…

Can I MPI_SEND (and MPI_RECV) with a count larger than 2 billion?

This question is inspired by the fact that the “count” parameter to MPI_SEND and MPI_RECV (and friends) is an “int” in C, which is typically a signed 4-byte integer, meaning that its largest positive value is 231, or about 2 billion. However, this is the wrong question. The r…

Open MPI and the MPI-3 MPI_T interface

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…

MPICH 3.0 RC released

The MPICH folks have released an RC candidate for MPICH 3.0: A new preview release of MPICH, 3.0rc1, is now available for download. The primary focus of this release is to provide full support for the MPI-3 standard.  Other smaller features including support for ARM v7 native atomics are also includ…

MPI-3 standard available in hardcover

The MPI-3.0 standard is now available in hardcover (it’s green!).  The book is available for cost by Dr. Rolf Rabenseifner at HLRS; no profit is being made by these sales.  Here’s an excerpt from Rolf’s original announcement: As a service (at costs) for users of the Message Passing…