A machine-independent communication library
George A. Geist, Michael T. Heath, Barry W. Peyton, P.H. Worley · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1989
In this report we describe a library of routines that enables the development of portable parallel programs. The library is designed primarily to provide portable communication primitives and related system calls for distributed-memory architectures. The package need not be limited to such machines, however, and we expect that the message-passing paradigm on which the library is based will also be useful on other parallel architectures for which data locality is an important performance consideration. The library also provides portable routines to perform certain widely-used, high-level communication operations, such as global broadcast and global sum. Their inclusion frees users from having to develop these commonly needed capabilities or to modify them to run on different machines. Finally, the library provides an execution tracing facility that can be used to monitor performance or to aid in debugging. 1 ref.