MPI over ATM help or how-to?

[joachim at lfbs.rwth-aachen.de]

> On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 09:13:19AM -0500, Lechner, David wrote:
> 
> > I am trying to do a comparison for customers that use ATM now - our goal is
> > to demonstrate the performance improvement in running native and optimized
> > FE communications vs. ATM (the cost savings is obvious) - 
> 
> I looked on the web and the only "native" ATM MPI implementation I see
> is MetaMPICH, which seems to have gone defunct before delivering the
> ATM part. So you are stuck with IP emulation over ATM, which is
> probably never faster than fast ethernet.

MetaMPICH (which I was involved with) was designed to couple
distributed MPI machines (T3E and SP2, in this case) via WAN
(4 x 622Mbit ATM, in this case). Therefore, we needed to use
multiple message routers on each machine. This worked quite well
for certain classes of applications (coupled simulations). 

It is no "native"
ATM usage in the sense that two processes directly exchange
data via ATM. ATM for LAN or even SAN usage is quite dead, as 
I see it.

  Joachim