Extending MPI to accelerators

Abstract

Current trends in computing and system architecture point towards a need for accelerators such as GPUs to have inherent communication capabilities. We review previous and current software libraries that provide pseudo-communication abilities through direct message passing. We show how these libraries are beneficial to the HPC community, but are not forward-thinking enough. We give motivation as to why MPI should be extended to support these accelerators, and provide a road map of achievable milestones to complete such an extension, some of which require advances in hardware and device drivers.