R.: Toward Efficient Support for Multithreaded MPI Communication

Abstract. To make the most effective use of parallel machines that are being built out of increasingly large multicore chips, researchers are ex-ploring the use of programming models comprising a mixture of MPI and threads. Such hybrid models require efficient support from an MPI imple-mentation for MPI messages sent from multiple threads simultaneously. In this paper, we explore the issues involved in designing such an im-plementation. We present four approaches to building a fully thread-safe MPI implementation, with decreasing levels of critical-section granular-ity (from coarse-grain locks to fine-grain locks to lock-free operations) and correspondingly increasing levels of complexity. We describe how we have structured our implementation to support all four approaches and enable one to be selected at build time. We present performance results with a message-rate benchmark to demonstrate the performance implications of the different approaches.