Abstract
This paper presents OPAL-MPI, our integration of the message passing interface into the functional programming language OPAL. It describes the problems occurring when the functional style with MPI are combined. One of them is the presence of dynamic data structures which requires the creation of an internal communication buffer where the data is packed.
The resulting programmer interface is more abstract and high-level than in MPI as data types and sizes need not to be passed as parameters to the communication operations. It allows arbitrary data types and even functions to be send quite easily.
However, due to the lack of a request handling in MPI 1.1 non-blocking receives cannot be implemented efficiently with full overlapping of computation and communucation.
The work is being supported by a scholarship from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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References
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Nitsche, T., Webers, W. (1998). Functional message passing with OPAL-MPI. In: Alexandrov, V., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1497. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056586
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056586
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