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.
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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