MP-MPICH 1.4.0

MP-MPICH provides a Multi-platform MPI implementation.

MP-MICH is a Multi-platform uniform MPI implementation, based on MPICH and SCI-MPICH, resulting in a high performance, consistent MPI across both ethernet and SCI networks in a hybrid environment. There is a single, standardized source tree for all platforms. It is compliant with the MPI-1 standard.

MP-MPICH uses one common source tree for this purpose. It has a new device for Windows NT/2000/2003 to communicate via sockets, and an adapted shared memory device for SMP systems. Additionally, MP-MPICH is a superset of SCI-MPICH, that means that it includes another new device to support direct communication via a fast SCI interconnect. With SCI-MPICH, inter-process message latencies for small messages (for processes running on separate nodes) below 4 us are achieved, and the current measured maximum inter-node (PingPong-)bandwidth is at about 310 MB/s.

In fact, the development of MP-MPICH started when the first release of SCI-MPICH was finished. This release was designed for Solaris and Linux, but since it uses our SMI library which is also available for Windows NT, we thought it would be fun to port SCI-MPICH to NT. The initial port took only 4 hours and we were up and running with SCI-MPICH for NT. The additional/modified devices which are necessary to use MPICH on NT without these extremely fast SCI boards required more time to develop.