MMPS: Portable Message Passing Support for Parallel Computing

Abstract

Models of parallel computation based upon message passing are in wide-spread use today, yet the message passing primitives available on different architectures are often different in subtle ways. The situation on distributed systems is even worse; not only are there different interfaces, but the services provided are not sufficient for data driven computation. MMPS is a solution to the problem. First, MMPS provides a basic message passing service with guaranteed delivery that can be ported to a wide variety of architectures. Applications that use the MMPS interface will be portable with respect to the message system. Second, MMPS provides a customizable interface that exploits the C++ [l] class hierarchy to allow the user to define new types of messages with new services. The new services can be efficiently implemented using existing code and inheritance.