# Presentation: 944526

## MPI-2:  Extending the Message-Passing Interface

- Bill Gropp
- Rusty Lusk
- Argonne National Laboratory

## Outline 

- Background
- Review of strict message-passing model
- Dynamic Process Management
- Dynamic process startup
- Dynamic establishment of connections
- One-sided communication
- Put/get
- Other operations
- Miscellaneous MPI-2 features
- Generalized requests
- Bindings for C++/ Fortran-90; interlanguage issues
- Parallel I/O

## Reaction to MPI-1

- Initial public reaction:
- It’s too big!
- It’s too small!
- Implementations appeared quickly
- Freely available (MPICH, LAM, CHIMP) helped expand the user base
- MPP vendors (IBM, Intel, Meiko, HP-Convex, SGI, Cray) found they could get high performance from their machines with MPI.
- MPP users:
- quickly added MPI to the set of message-passing libraries they used;
- gradually began to take advantage of MPI capabilities.
- MPI became a requirement in procurements.

## 1995 OSC Users Poll Results

- Diverse collection of users
- All MPI functions in use, including “obscure” ones.
- Extensions requested:
- parallel I/O
- process management
- connecting to running processes
- put/get, active messages
- interrupt-driven receive
- non-blocking collective
- C++ bindings
- Threads, odds and ends

## MPI-2 Origins

- Began meeting in March 1995, with
- veterans of MPI-1
- new vendor participants (especially Cray and SGI, and Japanese manufacturers)
- Goals:
- Extend computational model beyond message-passing
- Add new capabilities
- Respond to user reaction to MPI-1
- MPI-1.1 released in June, 1995 with MPI-1 repairs, some bindings changes
- MPI-1.2 and MPI-2 released July, 1997
- _[http://www.mpi-forum.org](http://www.mpi-forum.org/)_

## Contents of MPI-2

- Extensions to the message-passing model
- Dynamic process management
- One-sided operations
- Parallel I/O
- Making MPI more robust and convenient
- C++ and Fortran 90 bindings
- External interfaces, handlers
- Extended collective operations
- Language interoperability
- MPI interaction with threads

## Intercommunicators

- Contain a *local* group and a *remote* group
- Point-to-point communication is between a process in one group and a process in the other.
- Can be merged into a normal (intra) communicator.
- Created by **MPI_Intercomm_create** in MPI-1.
- Play a more important role in MPI-2, created in multiple ways.

## Intercommunicators

- In MPI-1, created out of separate intracommunicators.
- In MPI-2, created by partitioning an existing intracommunicator.
- In MPI-2, the intracommunicators may come from different MPI_COMM_WORLDs

- Local group

- Remote group

- Send(1)

- Send(2)

## Dynamic Process Management

- Issues
- maintaining simplicity, flexibility, and correctness
- interaction with operating system, resource manager, and process manager
- connecting independently started processes
- Spawning new processes is *collective, *returning an intercommunicator.
- Local group is group of spawning processes.
- Remote group is group of new processes.
- New processes have own **MPI_COMM_WORLD**.
**MPI_Comm_get_parent** lets new processes find parent communicator.

## Spawning Processes

**MPI_Comm_spawn(command, argv, numprocs, info, root, comm, intercomm, errcodes)**
- Tries to  start **numprocs** process running **command**, passing them command-line arguments **argv**.
- The operation is collective over **comm**.
- Spawnees are in remote group of **intercomm**.
- Errors are reported on a per-process basis in **errcodes.**
**Info** used to optionally specify hostname, archname, wdir, path, file, softness.

## Spawning Multiple Executables

**MPI_Comm_spawn_multiple( ... )**
- Arguments** command, argv, numprocs, info **all become arrays.
- Still collective

## In the Children

**MPI_Init**          (only MPI programs can be                              spawned)
**MPI**_**COMM**_**WORLD** is processes spawned with one call to **MPI_Comm_spawn.**
**MPI_Comm_get_parent **obtains parent intercommunicator.
- Same as intracommunicator returned by **MPI**_**Comm**_**spawn** in parents.
- Remote group is spawners.
- Local group is those spawned.

## Manager-Worker Example

- Single manager process decides how many workers to create and which executable they should run.
- Manager spawns n workers, and addresses them as 0, 1, 2, ..., n-1 in new intercomm.
- Workers address each other as 0, 1, ... n-1 in **MPI_COMM_WORLD**, address manager as 0 in parent intercomm.
- One can find out how many processes can usefully be spawned.

## Establishing Connections

- Two sets of MPI processes may wish to establish connections, e.g.,
- Two parts of an application started separately.
- A visualization tool wishes to attach to an application.
- A server wishes to accept connections from multiple clients.  Both server and client may be parallel programs.
- Establishing connections is collective but asymmetric (“Client”/“Server”).
- Connection results in an intercommunicator.

## Connecting Processes

- Server:
**MPI_Open_port( info, port_name )**
- system supplies port_name
-  might be host:num; might be low-level switch #
**MPI_Comm_accept( port_name, info, root, comm, intercomm )**
- collective over comm
- returns intercomm; remote group is clients
- Client:
**MPI_Comm_connect( port_name, info, root, comm, intercomm )**
- remote group is server

## Optional Name Service

**MPI_Publish_name( service_name, info,****                 port_name )**
**MPI_Lookup_name( service_name, info,****                 port_name )**
- allow connection between **service_name** known to users and system-supplied **port_name**

## Bootstrapping

**MPI_Join( fd, intercomm )**
- collective over two processes connected by a socket.
**fd** is a file descriptor for an open, quiescent socket.
**intercomm** is a new intercommunicator.
- Can be used to build up full MPI communication.
**fd **is *not* used for MPI communication.

## One-Sided Operations:  Issues

- Balancing efficiency and portability across a wide class of architectures
- shared-memory multiprocessors
- NUMA architectures
- distributed-memory MPP’s
- Workstation networks
- Retaining “look and feel” of MPI-1
- Dealing with subtle memory behavior issues:  cache coherence, sequential consistency
- Synchronization is separate from data movement.

## Remote Memory Access Windows

**MPI_Win_create( base, size, disp_unit, info, comm, win )**
- Exposes memory given by **(base, size) ** to RMA operations by other processes in **comm**.
**win** is window object used in RMA operations.
**Disp_unit** scales displacements:
- 1 (no scaling) or **sizeof(type)**, where window is an array of elements of type **type**.
- Allows use of array indices.
- Allows heterogeneity.

## One-Sided Communication Calls

**MPI_Put** - stores into remote memory
**MPI_Get** - reads from remote memory
**MPI_Accumulate** - updates remote memory
- All are non-blocking:  data transfer is initiated,  but may continue after call returns.
- Subsequent synchronization on window is needed to ensure operations are complete.

## Put, Get, and Accumulate

**MPI_Put( origin_addr, origin_count,****   origin_datatype, target_addr,****   target_count,target_datatype,****   window )**
**MPI_Get(  ... )**
**MPI_Accumulate( ..., op, ... )**
**op** is as in **MPI**_**Reduce**, but no user-defined operations are allowed.

## Synchronization

- Multiple methods for synchronizing on window:
**MPI_Win_fence** - like barrier, supports BSP model
**MPI_Win_{start, complete, post, wait}** - for closer control, involves groups of processes
**MPI_Win_{lock, unlock}** - provides shared-memory model.

## Extended Collective Operations

- In MPI-1, collective operations are restricted to ordinary (intra) communicators.
- In MPI-2, most collective operations apply also to intercommunicators, with appropriately different semantics.
- E.g, Bcast/Reduce in the intercommunicator resulting from spawning new processes goes from/to root in spawning processes to/from the spawned processes.
- In-place extensions

## External Interfaces

- Purpose:  to ease extending MPI by layering new functionality portably and efficiently
- Aids integrated tools (debuggers, performance analyzers)
- In general, provides portable access to parts of MPI implementation internals.
- Already being used in layering I/O part of MPI on multiple MPI implementations.

## Components of MPI External Interface Specification

- Generalized requests
- Users can create custom non-blocking operations with an interface similar to MPI’s.
**MPI_Waitall** can wait on combination of built-in and user-defined operations.
- Naming objects
- Set/Get name on communicators, datatypes, windows.
- Adding error classes and codes
- Datatype decoding
- Specification for thread-compliant MPI

## C++ Bindings

- C++ binding alternatives:
- use C bindings
- Class library (e.g., OOMPI)
- “minimal” binding
- Chose “minimal” approach
- Most MPI functions are member functions of MPI classes:
- example:  **MPI::COMM_WORLD.send( ... )**
- Others are in MPI namespace
- C++ bindings for both MPI-1 and MPI-2

## Fortran Issues

- “Fortran” now means Fortran-90.
- MPI can’t take advantage of some new Fortran (-90) features, e.g., array sections.
- Some MPI features are incompatible with Fortran-90.
- e.g., communication operations with different types for first argument, assumptions about argument copying.
- MPI-2 provides “basic” and “extended” Fortran support.

## Fortran

- Basic support:
**mpif.h** must be valid in both fixed- and free-from format.
- Extended support:
- mpi module
- some new functions using parameterized types

## Language Interoperability

- Single **MPI_Init**
- Passing MPI objects between languages
- Constant values, error handlers
- Sending in one language; receiving in another
- Addresses
- Datatypes
- Reduce operations

## Why MPI is a Good Setting for Parallel I/O

- Writing is like sending and reading is like receiving.
- Any parallel I/O system will need:
- collective operations
- user-defined datatypes to describe both memory and file layout
- communicators to separate application-level message passing from I/O-related message passing
- non-blocking operations
- I.e., lots of MPI-like machinery

## Informal Status Assessment

- Released July, 1997
- All MPP vendors now have MPI-1. (1.0, 1.1, or 1.2)
- Free implementations (MPICH, LAM, CHIMP) support heterogeneous workstation networks.
- MPI-2 implementations are being undertaken now by all vendors.
- Fujitsu has a complete MPI-2 implementation
- MPI-2 is harder to implement than MPI-1 was.
- MPI-2 implementations will appear piecemeal, with I/O first.

## Performance Issues in MPI-2

- Threads
- Use of threads requires thread-safe code; may require expensive locks inside the implementation
- MPI_INIT_THREAD options
- Dynamic Processes
- Adding processes with MPI_Spawn may not provide peak performance
- One-sided
- New ways to defer synchronization
- Efficient implementation on non-shared memory hardware is challenging.
- Parallel I/O
- Implementations exist...

## Summary

- MPI-2 provides major extensions to the original message-passing model targeted by MPI-1.
- MPI-2 can deliver to libraries and applications portability across a diverse set of environments.
- Implementations are under way.
- The MPI standard documents are available at     _[http://www.mpi-forum.org](http://www.mpi-forum.org/)_