Design and Implementation of MPICH2 over Optical Fiber

Due to its high performance, optical fiber is more and more popular in the area of high performance computing. In this area, message-passing interface (MPI) has been the most popular standard for writing parallel applications. MPICH2 is the most famous implementation of MPI, inherited from MPICH, features a completely new design which to provide more performances and flexibilities. However, optical fiber is a based on circuit-switched network, which can dynamicly establish and disconnect lightpaths when needed. The communication operations in MPI are designed for package-switched networks such as Ethernet, which can not support the feature of dynamic connection and disconnection. In this paper, we present our experiences in designing and implementing MPICH2 over optical fiber with the support of the control plane in optical fiber network. Our study focused on modifying the communication operations in MPICH2.