CS Colloquium
Challenges for the Message-Passing Interface in the PetaFLOPS Era
Monday, March 26, 2007, 10:00 A.M.
2405 Siebel Center, 201 N. Goodwin Ave.
Abstract
MPI has been a successful parallel programming model. The combination
of performance, scalability, composability, and support for libraries
has made it relatively easy to build complex parallel applications.
Further, these applications scale well, with some applications already
running on systems with over 128000 processors. However, MPI is by no
means the perfect parallel programming model. This talk will review
the strengths of MPI with respect to other parallel programming models
and discuss some of the weaknesses and limitations of MPI in the areas
of performance, productivity, scalability, and interoperability. The
impact of recent developments in computing, such as multicore, better
networks, and global view programming models on both MPI and
applications that use MPI will be covered, as well as lessons from the
success of MPI that are relevant to furture progress in parallel
computing. The talk will conclude with a discussion of what extensions
(or even changes) may be needed in MPI, and what issues should be
addressed by combining MPI with other parallel programming
Biography
William Gropp received his B.S. in Mathematics from Case Western
Reserve University in 1977, MS in Physics from the University of
Washington in 1978, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in
1982. He held the positions of assistant (1982-1988) and associate
(1988-1990) professor in the Computer Science Department at Yale
University. In 1990, he joined the Numerical Analysis group at Argonne,
where he is a Senior Computer Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer
Science Division, a Senior Scientist in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Fellow in the
Argonne-Chicago Computation Institute. His research interests are in
parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical
methods for partial differential equations. He has played a major role
in the development of the MPI message-passing standard. He is co-author
of MPICH, the
most widely used implementation of MPI, and was involved in the MPI
Forum as a chapter author for both MPI-1 and MPI-2. He has written many
books and papers on MPI including Using MPI and Using MPI-2.
He is also one of the designers of the
PETSc parallel
numerical library, and has developed efficient and scalable parallel
algorithms for the solution of linear and nonlinear equations. Gropp
was named an ACM Fellow in 2006.