Enhancing Programmability in NoC-Based Lightweight Manycore Processors with a Portable MPI Library

International audienceThe performance and energy efficiency provided by lightweight many-cores is undeniable. However, the lack of rich and portable support for these processors makes software development challenging. To address this problem, we propose a portable and lightweight MPI library (LWMPI) designed from scratch to cope with restrictions and intricacies of lightweight manycores. We integrated LWMPI into a distributed OS that targets these processors and evaluated it on the Kalray MPPA-256 processor. Results obtained with three applications from a representative benchmark suite unveiled that LWMPI achieves similar performance scalability in comparison with the low-level vendor-specific API narrowed for MPPA-256, while exposing a richer programming interface