Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4917

36 J. Psota and A. Agarwal
rMPI was designed to leverage the unique architectural resources that a multicore processor
architecture with on-chip networks and direct access to hardware resources such
as Raw provides.
A number of evaluations using the rMPI implementation show that its overhead,
especially for applications with many short messages on multicores such as Raw, illustrates
that MPI is likely not the optimal interface for multicores with on-chip interconnect,
as it imposes significant overhead on all communication. Furthermore, rMPI’s
large memory footprint makes it less well-suited for multicore’s generally smaller onchip
instruction caches. Overall, this work shows that MPI is too heavyweight for multicores
with on-chip networks such as Raw, and suggests that a lighter-weight multicore
programming interface that takes advantage of low latency networks and has a smaller
memory footprint be developed. The authors hope that this work provides guidance
and useful insights to application developers of future multicore processors containing
on-chip interconnect.
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