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MetaMPICH - Flexible Coupling of Heterogenous MPI Systems

MetaMPICH Project Description

The coupling of parallel systems is an evolving technique to solve more complex thus larger problems in High Performance Computing and to efficiently use available computing resources. The resulting system, which consists of multiple independent and heterogenous (with respect to the operating system, architecture, CPU type and internal networks) systems is commonly called a Metacomputer.

Principle of a Metacomputer
A Metacomputer Composed of Four Linked Clusters

To ease the utilization of any parallel system (like such a Metacomputer), which in many cases means finding the solution to a scientific problem which is described in mathematical formulas, a programming model and a corresponding interface are required. A widely used programming model for parallel systems is SPMD (Single Program Multiple Data which means that all CPUs process the same code on different parts of the data which makes up the problem to solve) with Message Passing (exchanging data between processes by explicitly sending and receiving specified portions of data) as communication means. The MPI (Message Passing Interface) programming interface is based upon this model, and is available on virtually every existing computing system. Next to the vendor supplied implementations of MPI, MPICH is the most popular implementation which is freely available for a wide variety of UNIX-like systems.

MetaMPICH is a Metacomputing extension to the MPICH implementation and a part of the MP-MPICH distribution.

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