Publications

J. Dinan, P. Balaji, J. R. Hammond, Sriram Krishnamoorthy, and V. Tipparaju, "Supporting the Global Arrays PGAS Model Using MPI One-Sided Communication," Proc. 26th Intl. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symp. (IPDPS), 2012. Also Preprint ANL/MCS-P1878-0411, October 2012. [pdf]

The industry-standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) provides one-sided communication functionality and is available on virtually every parallel computing system. However, it is believed that MPI's one-sided model is not rich enough to support higher-level global address space parallel programming models. We present the first successful application of MPI one-sided communication as a runtime system for a PGAS model, Global Arrays (GA). This work has an immediate impact on users of GA applications, such as NWChem, who often must wait several months to a year or more before GA becomes available on a new architecture. We explore challenges present in the application of MPI-2 to PGAS models and motivate new features in the upcoming MPI-3 standard. The performance of our system is evaluated on several popular high-performance computing architectures through communication benchmarking and application benchmarking using the NWChem computational chemistry suite.