Abstract
MPI has become the dominant programming paradigm in high performance computing partly due to its portability: an MPI application can run on a wide range of architectures. Unfortunately, portability in MPI is only guaranteed for compiling codes; it does not necessarily mean that an MPI program will actually result in the same behavior on different platforms. The MPITEST suite provides a series of micro kernels to test MPI implementations across different systems. All codes of MPITEST conform to the MPI standard; however, their behavior is implementation dependent, potentially leading to unexpected results. In this paper we introduce MPITEST and present examples from the test suite along with their surprising results and consequences on a series of platforms. The goal of this work is to demonstrate this problem in general and to raise awareness in the MPI user community.
Part of work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract No. W-7405-Eng-48. UCRL-PROC-222368.
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Schulz, M., Kranzlmüller, D., de Supinski, B.R. (2006). Exploring Unexpected Behavior in MPI. In: Gerndt, M., Kranzlmüller, D. (eds) High Performance Computing and Communications. HPCC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4208. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11847366_87
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11847366_87
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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