A Proposal for a User-Level, Message-Passing Interface in a Distributed Memory Environment

This paper describes essage Passing Interface 1 ( PI1 , a proposed library interface standard for supporting point-to-point message passing. The intended standard will be provided with ortran 77 and interfaces, and will form the basis of a standard high level communication environment featuring collective communication and data distribution transformations. The standard proposed here provides bloc ing and nonbloc ing message passing between pairs of processes, with message selectivity by source process and message type. Provision is made for noncontiguous messages. ontext control provides a convenient means of avoiding message selectivity con icts between di erent phases of an application. The ability to form and manipulate process groups permits tas parallelism to be exploited, and is a useful abstraction in controlling certain types of collective communication.

[1]  David Gelernter,et al.  Generative communication in Linda , 1985, TOPL.

[2]  P. Pierce,et al.  The NX/2 operating system , 1988, C3P.

[3]  Nicholas Carriero,et al.  How to write parallel programs: a guide to the perplexed , 1989, CSUR.

[4]  Vaidy S. Sunderam,et al.  PVM: A Framework for Parallel Distributed Computing , 1990, Concurr. Pract. Exp..

[5]  Henri E. Bal.  Programming distributed systems , 1990 .

[6]  Anthony Skjellum,et al.  A Portable Multicomputer Communication Library atop the Reactive Kernel , 1990, Proceedings of the Fifth Distributed Memory Computing Conference, 1990..

[7]  Rolf Hempel,et al.  The ANL/GMD Macros (PARMACS) in FORTRAN for Portable Parallel Programming using the Message Passing , 1991 .

[8]  J PritchardD.  Concurrency: Practice and Experience , 1991 .

[9]  Steve W. Otto,et al.  MetaMP : a higher level abstraction for message- passing programming , 1991 .

[10]  Al Geist,et al.  Network-based concurrent computing on the PVM system , 1992, Concurr. Pract. Exp..

[11]  Anthony Skjellum,et al.  The Zipcode message-passing system , 1992 .

[12]  Patrick H. Worley,et al.  Parallelizing the spectral transform method. Part II , 1992, Concurr. Pract. Exp..

[13]  D. W. Walker,et al.  Standards for message-passing in a distributed memory environment , 1992 .

[14]  Larry Rudolph,et al.  Designing Efficient, Scalable, and Portable Collective Communication Libraries , 1993, PPSC.

[15]  Vasanth Bala,et al.  Process Groups: a mechanism for the coordination of and communication among processes in the Venus collective communication library , 1993, [1993] Proceedings Seventh International Parallel Processing Symposium.