341MPI PROCESS SWAPPING A SIMPLE MPI PROCESS SWAPPING ARCHITECTURE FOR ITERATIVE APPLICATIONS

Parallel computing is now popular and mainstream, but performance and ease of use remain elusive to many end-users. There exists a need for performance improve-ments that can be easily retrofitted to existing parallel applications. In this paper we present MPI process swap-ping, a simple performance enhancing add-on to the MPI programming paradigm. MPI process swapping improves performance by dynamically choosing the best available resources throughout application execution, using MPI process over-allocation and real-time performance meas-urement. Swapping provides fully automated performance monitoring and process management, and a rich set of primitives to control execution behavior manually or through an external tool. Swapping, as defined in this implementation, can be added to iterative MPI applica-tions and requires as few as three lines of source code change. We verify our design for a particle dynamics application on desktop resources within a production commercial environment. Key words: MPI, process swapping, over-allocation, parallel computin