Programming of Parallel Computers/Lecture 3

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1 Summary
- 1.1 Parallel Programming Models
- 1.2 MPI (Message Passing Interface)

Summary

A brief discussion of parallel programming models, followed by an introduction to some detail of MPI.

Parallel Programming Models

To be added.

MPI (Message Passing Interface)

Notes

Scans of MPI notes and slides are now online.

The scanning was done from two-up (i.e. reduced so two pages fit on one page) photocopies provided by Jarmo.

Scans have been split into "natural pages", rotated if necessary, and cropped to content. These are available:

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As a PDF document (screen viewing, 4.2MB)

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Complete sets of scans (150ppi grayscale), directly as they came from the scanner software (i.e. not split, rotated, or cropped), are also available (better for printing out):

As a zip archive of PNGs (scans, 5.8MB)
As a PDF document (scans, printing, 5.4MB)

Overview

MPI appeared in 1994. The MPI Forum define and maintain the MPI standards.

The MPI standard is cumulative in the sense that the MPI 2.0 documents extensions (and some clarifications) to MPI 1.1, so the appearance of 'mpi-11 in the URLs below, referring to MPI 1.1 does not mean that the links are out-of-date. Although C++ and Fortran bindings are defined, C function names are used below.

MPI is a standard specification of functionality and interfaces, not an implementation. A number of implementations are available including (free):

Open MPI is installed on duma and simba.

On duma and simba, the MPI implementation is Sun MPI 6.0 (part of the Sun HPC package), which supports MPI 2.0. Documentation can be found under /opt/SUNWhpc/doc/.