Abstract

We propose extensions to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that generalize the MPI communicator concept to allow multiple communication endpoints per process, dynamic creation of endpoints, and the transfer of endpoints between processes. The generalized communicator construct can be used to express a wide range of interesting communication structures, including collective communication operations involving multiple threads per process, communications between dynamically created threads or processes, and object-oriented applications in which communications are directed to specific objects. Furthermore, this enriched functionality can be provided in a manner that preserves backward compatibility with MPI. We describe the proposed extensions, illustrate their use with examples, and describe a prototype implementation in the popular MPI implementation MPICH.

Date

March 13, 1986

Authors

Erik D Demaine, Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, Marc Snir

Conference

1202 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE—November 2000 Bates, MJ