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

This paper discusses several approaches to designing and implementing shared-memory communication protocol modules for the message-passing interface (MPI) libraries, colloquially called ‘shared-memory devices’. The authors present a new taxonomy for classifying designs for shared-memory MPI communication devices and formulate design evaluation criteria. Using these criteria, the authors compare three existing shared-memory devices for MPICH and choose the best one. The authors also present experimental results that support their choice. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, the authors present the taxonomy for sharedmemory communication devices. Second, they show advantages and potential problems of the devices that belong to different classes of their taxonomy using the formulated design criteria. Third, they analyze communication performance of existing MPICH shared-memory devices, discuss optimizations of their performance, and show the performance gains that these optimizations yield. MPICH is used for comparison, since it is a widely used MPI implementation. Copyright 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.