A Grid-Enabled MPI: Message Passing in Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Systems

Abstract

Application development for high-performance distributed computing systems, or computational grids as they are sometimes called, requires ``grid-enabled'' tools that hide mundane aspects of the heterogeneous grid environment without compromising performance. As part of an investigation of these issues, we have developed MPICH-G, a grid-enabled implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across multiple computers at different sites using the same commands that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus grid toolkit. In this paper, we describe the MPICH-G implementation and present preliminary performance results.