Abstract

We propose extensions to the Message Passing In-terface (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, includ-ing collective communication operations involving mul-tiple threads per process, communications between dy-namically created threads, and object-oriented applica-tions in which communications are directed to specific objects. Furthermore, this enriched functionality can be provided in a manner that preserves backward compat-ibility with MPI. We describe the proposed extensions, illustrate their use with examples, and discuss imple-mentation issues.

Date

March 13, 1995

Authors

Ian Foster, Marc Snir, Carl Kesselman

Journal

Designing and Building Parallel Programs. Addison-Wesley