PMI: A scalable parallel process-management interface for extreme-scale systems

Pavan Balaji, Darius Buntinas, David Goodell, William Gropp, Jayesh Krishna, Ewing Lusk, Rajeev Thakur

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Parallel programming models on large-scale systems require a scalable system for managing the processes that make up the execution of a parallel program. The process-management system must be able to launch millions of processes quickly when starting a parallel program and must provide mechanisms for the processes to exchange the information needed to enable them communicate with each other. MPICH2 and its derivatives achieve this functionality through a carefully defined interface, called PMI, that allows different process managers to interact with the MPI library in a standardized way. In this paper, we describe the features and capabilities of PMI. We describe both PMI-1, the current generation of PMI used in MPICH2 and all its derivatives, as well as PMI-2, the second-generation of PMI that eliminates various shortcomings in PMI-1. Together with the interface itself, we also describe a reference implementation for both PMI-1 and PMI-2 in a new process-management framework within MPICH2, called Hydra, and compare their performance in running MPI jobs with thousands of processes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationRecent Advances in the Message Passing Interface - 17th European MPI Users' Group Meeting, EuroMPI 2010, Proceedings
Pages31-41
Number of pages11
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event17th European MPI Users' Group Meeting, EuroMPI 2010 - Stuttgart, Germany
Duration: Sep 12 2010Sep 15 2010

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume6305 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other17th European MPI Users' Group Meeting, EuroMPI 2010
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityStuttgart
Period9/12/109/15/10

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'PMI: A scalable parallel process-management interface for extreme-scale systems'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this