What is collective communication?
Christopher Cameron, Steve Lantz, Brandon Barker, CAC Staff (original)
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
Revisions: 5/2022, 1/2014, 2001 (original)
Collective communication involves communication among the members of a communicator — a set of processes (Communicators are introduced in the MPI Communicators topic). The purpose of collective communication is to manipulate a shared piece or set of information. Collective communication can be used for synchronization, data movement, and global computation.
Objectives
- Distinguish between MPI Point-to-Point and Collective communications
- List the three subsets of collective communication
Prerequisites
- A basic knowledge of parallel programming and MPI. Information on these prerequisites can be found in other topics (Parallel Programming Concepts and High-Performance Computing, MPI Basics).
- Ability to program in a high-level language such as Fortran or C.