Section: New Results

Hierarchical Communication Management in MPI

MPI, in its current state provides only a very limited set of functionnalities so as to allow the programmer to effectively leverage the physical characteristics of the underlying hardaware, such as the potentially complex memory hierarchy. The MPI philosophy being to be a hardware-agnostic interface, the challenge is therefore to propose an interface extension that offers the programmer significant control over the hardawre without dwelving too much into hardware details. We seek the right level of abstraction for this interface and the goal is push this proposal to the MPI Forum. This new interface is based on the concept of communicators, expands an already existing function available in the standard and also introduces a couple of helper functions. We have prototyped and drafted our proposal for the 2017 meetings of the forum.