MGF: A grid-enabled MPI library

Computational grids allow access to several computing resources interconnected in a distributed heterogeneous infrastructure for parallel computing. This powerful resource aggregation increases the application runtime environment complexity. A simple programming model, capable of hiding this complexity, facilitates the use of grid technology in high-performance computing. The message passing interface can play this role and make the grid more accessible to developers with parallel programming skills. In this paper we present MGF, a grid-enabled MPI implementation which extends the existing MPICH-G2. MGF aims are: to allow the transparent use of coupled Grid resources within the MPI library; to give programmers a detailed view of the execution system network topology; to use the most efficient channel available for point-to-point communications and finally, to improve collective operation efficiency by introducing a delegation mechanism. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.