An MPI prototype for compiled communication on Ethernet switched clusters

Compiled communication has recently been proposed to improve communication performance for clusters of workstations. The idea of compiled communication is to apply more aggressive optimizations to communications whose information is known at compile time. Existing MPI libraries do not support compiled communication. In this paper, we present an MPI prototype, CC–MPI, that supports compiled communication on Ethernet switched clusters. The unique feature of CC–MPI is that it allows the user to manage network resources such as multicast groups directly and to optimize communications based on the availability of the communication information. CC–MPI optimizes one–to–all, one–to–many, all–to–all, and many–to–many collective communication routines using the compiled communication technique. We describe the techniques used in CC–MPI and report its performance. The results show that communication performance of Ethernet switched clusters can be significantly improved through compiled communication.