Re: Any thoughts on BEEP over MPI?

Marshall Rose wrote:

>> I'm trying to figure out if MPI is a general enough message passing
>> protocol that you could implement BEEP over it, and whether it would
>> be a good idea. In particular, whether MPI could be faster than TCP.
>>
>> Any pointers or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> MPI = http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/standard.html ??? or something  
> else?
>
Very odd thought.

MPI is used widely as a message-passing API (particularly w/ C,C++ and 
Fortran) for high performance computing HPC). The synchronous (2-way) 
MPI is used much more widely than the 1-way (remote memory read/write) 
enabled version. It supports user-space synchronous message-passing. 
(There is also support, using immediate/nonblocking mode for 
asynchronous messaging.) The bulk of MPI is oriented towards supporting 
collective operations (e.g. all reduce) over a group of such processes 
participating in point to point interactions with each other (grouped 
together in a communicator). Not sure this is particularly relevant for 
BEEP.

Why would you want to do this? Perhaps what you might be after is that 
often HPC clusters are built over extremely high-performance 
interconnects that are non-IP-based. For instance, ARMCI and LAPI, based 
on infiniband/quadrics/myrinet/IBM Federation switches  and other 
network I/O cards

 http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/nieplocha99armci.html
 http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/docs/global/papers/lapi.pdf

(There is also GASNet, http://gasnet.cs.berkeley.edu/)

So you might consider layering on top of these.

What are you really after?

Best,
Vijay