Development of an MPICH2-CH3 Device for InfiniBand

More and more clusters are already equipped or planned with InfiniBand as interconnect technology.

InfiniBand architecture is an open industry standard that provides modern concepts for high-bandwidth, low-latency, as well as reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS) features.

MPICH2 as the successor of one of the most popular open source message passing implementations aims to fully support the MPI-2 standard. Due to a complete redesign, MPICH2 is cleaner, more flexible, faster, and has better internal instrumentation.

We expect for the near future that requirements in many cluster environments can only be satisfied by MPICH2 and InfiniBand. Hence, there is the need for an effective support of the InfiniBand interconnect technology by MPICH2.

Based on the Verbs interface, currently we use Mellanox Verbs implementation VAPI, this project implements the CH3 interface of MPICH2 - a so called MPICH2-CH3-IB Device. Due to ongoing development and research activities the performance of the implementation - and so the performance for MPI user applications - does increase constantly. The project also focuses on functionality and conformity. As MPICH2 evoles and implements MPI-2, our MPICH2-CH3-IB Device will also provide support for these features. Development platform is Linux on ia32 systems.

Some first experimental results are shown in the BenchmarkResults.