Why is MPI so big?



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Why is MPI so big?

  One aspect of concern, particularly to novices, is the large number of routines comprising the MPI specification. In all there are 128 MPI routines, and further extensions (see Section gif) will probably increase their number. There are two fundamental reasons for the size of MPI. The first reason is that MPI was designed to be rich in functionality. This is reflected in MPI's support for derived datatypes, modular communication via the communicator abstraction, caching, application topologies, and the fully-featured set of collective communication routines. The second reason for the size of MPI reflects the diversity and complexity of today's high performance computers. This is particularly true with respect to the point-to-point communication routines where the different communication modes (see Sections gif and gif) arise mainly as a means of providing a set of the most widely-used communication protocols. For example, the synchronous communication mode corresponds closely to a protocol that minimizes the copying and buffering of data through a rendezvous mechanism. A protocol that attempts to initiate delivery of messages as soon as possible would provide buffering for messages, and this corresponds closely to the buffered communication mode (or the standard mode if this is implemented with sufficient buffering). One could decrease the number of functions by increasing the number of parameters in each call. But such approach would increase the call overhead and would make the use of the most prevalent calls more complex. The availability of a large number of calls to deal with more esoteric features of MPI allows one to provide a simpler interface to the more frequently used functions.



Jack Dongarra
Fri Sep 1 06:16:55 EDT 1995