[Beowulf] Re: MPI Implementations for SMP use

[Isaac Dooley]

Charm++ and AMPI(an adaptive MPI implementation) also do this(http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu). They conceptually run multiple Virtual Processors on each node, and they have both local and remote delivery options. There are some real benefits to this. On a technical level they can use our own user level threads, which I believe are faster than pthreads.

Isaac Dooley

>But thats just my intuition speaking!  Perhaps there are MPI
>implementations that are competitive with threads since they can very
>efficiently handle this "two-level" nature of communication: keeping it
>local for processes on the same node while still *simultaneously* taking
>care of the over-a-network bits for the rest.

>Ed