Hybrid Design of MPI over SCTP

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a popular message passing interface for writing parallel applications. It has been designed to run over many different types of network interconnects ranging from commodity Ethernet to more specialized hardwares including: shared memory, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) devices such as InfiniBand and the recently standardized Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP). The API itself provides both the point-to-point and remote memory access (RMA) operations to the application. However, it is often implemented based on one kind of underlying network device, namely entirely RDMA or point-to-point. As a result, it is often not possible to provide a direct mapping from the software semantics to the underlying hardware. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach in designing MPI in which network device to use can depend on its functional requirement. This allows the MPI API to exploit the potential performance benefits of the underlying hardware more directly. Another highlight of this work is the design of the MPI middleware to be IP based in order to provide support for both cluster and wide area network environment; this can be achieved via the use of a commodity transport layer protocol, namely Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). We will demonstrate how SCTP can be used to support MPI with different kinds of network devices and to provide multirailing support from the transport layer.