Multiple devices under MPICH.
Sven Schindler, Wolfgang Rehm · 1999
Rapid developments in networking technology and a rise in cluster computing have driven the construction of clusters of cluster. Obviously there is a need for a portable, easy--to--use, efficient software environment for those cluster type. In recent years, the MPICH implementation of MPI has become a widely used message passing interface because of its powerful and efficient layered approach to simplify porting MPI to new systems. Thereby the so called Abstract Device Interface (ADI) takes a key position. In this paper we describe an enhanced MPICH architecture. Whereas other MPICH implementations support only one communication medium for internode communication at a time our enhanced MPICH implementation supports different one`s too. The basic idea is to introduce a so--called multidevice besides individual devices, so called subdevices, each of them supporting a certain communication medium. Some relevant aspects of our implementation are discussed. Finally, performance measurement ...