Interoperable MPI Standard Demonstrated
December 2000
The first public demonstration of the Interoperable Message Passing
Interface (IMPI) took place at the
Supercomputing 2000 (SC'2000) Conference
held in Dallas, Texas the week of Nov 4, 2000. IMPI is
a generalization of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), the de
facto standard for writing parallel scientific applications in the
message passing programming paradigm, now provided by all high
performance computer vendors. IMPI specifies a protocol for
interoperability among vendor MPI implementations, thereby extending
the environments in which parallel jobs can be run to heterogeneous
clusters. Staff members of MCSD's Scientific Applications and
Visualization Group served as the facilitators for the development of
the IMPI standard, convening meetings, editing the specifications
document, and developing comformance tests.
The participants in the SC'2000 demonstration were Hewlett Packard,
MPI Software Technology, and the Laboratory for Scientific
Computation at the University of Notre Dame. Each participant ran
their own implementation of the IMPI protocols on their computing
platform, communicating with the other implementations in real time
on the floor of the SC'2000 exhibit center.
The IMPI protocols were designed by a steering committee of current
implementors of MPI. These protocols handle the demanding task of
maintaining interoperability among all IMPI implementations while
allowing for the independent evolution of the collective
communication algorithms. No changes to user MPI code is required to
use IMPI.
The NIST IMPI conformance tester is a web-based system that exercises
all aspects of the IMPI protocol. Vendors test their IMPI
implementation by connecting their MPI implementation to the to the
NIST IMPI web page.
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