Cornell Virtual Workshop: Message Passing Interface (MPI)

Roadmap: Message Passing Interface (MPI)

Introduction to MPIMPI ProgramsMPI MessagesMPI on TACC Systems Quiz

This roadmap will introduce you to the Message Passing Interface (MPI), a specification that is the de facto standard for distributed memory computing. MPI consists of a collection of routines for exchanging data among the processes in a distributed memory parallel program and synchronizing their work.

We will provide an overview of MPI's functionality and key concepts, and give you a first look at how to use MPI on Stampede2 and Frontera. This topic is intended to guide researchers getting started with MPI on high performance computing systems. All exercises and examples are verified to work on Stampede2 and Frontera.

This is the first of five MPI related roadmaps in the Cornell Virtual Workshop that cover MPI. To see the other roadmaps available, please visit the complete CVW roadmaps list.

Objectives

After you complete this roadmap, you should be able to:

Explain the concept of MPI
Write a simple MPI program
Run a simple MPI program on Stampede2
Compile MPI code
Run parallel jobs on Stampede2 using Slurm
Select the appropriate MPI implementation for your platform and work

Prerequisites

A working knowledge of general programming concepts
Ability to program in a high-level language such as Fortran, C, or C++
A basic familiarity with parallel programming concepts

Requirements

The examples and exercises in this roadmap are designed to run on Stampede3 or Frontera. To use these systems, you need:

A TACC account to login to Stampede2 or Frontera
A compute time allocation for Stampede2 or Frontera