Pattern Matching of Collective MPI Operations.
Dieter August Kranzlmüller, Andreas Knüpfer, Wolfgang E. Nagel · Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications · 2004
Abstract Programming message passing systems can be te-dious and error-prone, especially for the inexperi-enced user facing the sheer amount of availablefunctionality in todays message passing libraries.Instead of choosing the most optimal communica-tionfunction,manyuserstendtoapplyonlyasmallset of well-known standard operations. This paperdescribes a pattern matching approach based onexecutiontraces whichdetects connectedgroupsofpoint-to-point communication operations that mayresembleexisting collectiveoperations. After high-lightingthe detected patterns,users are able to im-prove their codes by replacing the point-to-pointoperationswith more appropriateandefficientcol-lective alternatives. Keywords: parallel programming, message pass-ing, pattern detection, collective operations 1 Motivation The Message Passing Interface standardMPI [5] is probably the most used parallelprogramming paradigm today [4]. This factis based on the characteristics of MPI, whichshould provide a “practical, portable, efficient,and flexible standard” for writing message-passing programs