Shared-memory communication approaches for an MPI message-passing library

This paper discusses several approaches to designing and implementing share d-memory communication protocol modules for the message-passing interface ( MPI) libraries, colloquially called 'shared-memory devices', The authors pr esent a new taxonomy for classifying designs for shared-memory MPI communic ation devices and formulate design evaluation criteria. Using these criteri a, the authors compare three existing shared-memory devices for MPICH and c hoose the best one. The authors also present experimental results that supp ort their choice. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, the authors present the taxonomy for shared-memory communication devices. Second, they show adv antages and potential problems of the devices that belong to different clas ses of their taxonomy using the formulated design criteria. Third, they ana lyze communication performance of existing MPICH shared-memory devices, dis cuss optimizations of their performance, and show the performance gains tha t these optimizations yield. MPICH is used for comparison, since it is a wi dely used MPI implementation. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.