Dynamic Process Management in an MPI Setting - Parallel and Distributed Processing, 1995. Proceedings., Seventh IEEE Symposium on

We describe an architecture f o r the runtime environment for parallel applications as prelude to describing how parallel application might interface to their environment in a portable way. We propose extensions to the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) Standard that provide for dynamic process management, including spawning of new processes b y a running application and connection to existing processes to support client/server applications. Such extensions are needed if more of the runtime environment for parallel programs is t o be accessible t o MPI programs or to be themselves written using MPI. The extensions proposed here are motivated b y real applications and fit cleanly with existing concepts of MPI. N o changes to the existing MPI Standard are proposed, thus all present MPI programs will run unchanged.