[Mpi-22] reConfigurable MPI

[William Gropp]

I think the statement explains it - during the MPI 2 discussions,  
there was a lot of effort spent on defining a portable, standard,  
resource control specification.  The forum was unable to reach a  
consensus, and rather than make a poor specification, they left it  
undefined.  This permits MPI implementations to explore interfaces  
with their resource management systems (and permits an MPI-based  
cluster to be reconfigurable), just not in a MPI-standard defined  
way.  Note that the info argument to the spawn routines, for example,  
provides a way to communicate with a resource manager; it was an  
explicit goal of the design of info to provide this way to  
communication information that is outside of the specification.

Bill

On Jun 30, 2010, at 2:56 PM, siavash ghiasvand wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In MPI22 Standard document [1] on page 305 lines 27-30 we can see  
> this paragraph:
>
> The MPI Forum decided not to address resource control because it was  
> not able to
> design a portable interface that would be appropriate for the broad  
> spectrum of existing
> and potential resource and process controllers. Resource control can  
> encompass a wide
> range of abilities, including adding and deleting nodes from a  
> virtual parallel machine, ...
>
> Which means, an MPI-based cluster is not reconfigurable at run time!  
> but in EuroPVM/MPI 2006 a reconfigurable version of MPI for HPC  
> clusters was described by University of New Mexico Scalable Systems  
> Lab [2] and they show that their implementation will enhance  
> performance (the main goal of MPI). So, why in MPI22 standard "The  
> MPI forum decided not to address resource control" which can improve  
> both flexibility and performance of an MPI-based cluster?
>
>
> Ref:
> MPI/CTP: A Reconfigurable MPI for HPC Applications
>
>
> Regards,
> Siavash
> <ATT00001..txt>

William Gropp
Deputy Director for Research
Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies
Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign



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