MPI for Python: performance improvements and MPI-2 extensions

Article

Authorship

Dalcin, Lisandro Daniel ; Paz, Rodrigo Rafael ; STORTI, MARIO ALBERTO ; D'ELIA, JORGE

Date

2008

Publishing House and Editing Place

Elsevier

Magazine

JOURNAL OF PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING, vol. 68 (pp. 655-662) Elsevier

Summary Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA

MPI for Python provides bindings of the message passing interface (MPI) standard for the Python programming language and allows any Python program to exploit multiple processors. In its first release, MPI for Python was constructed on top of the MPI-1 specification defining an object-oriented interface that closely followed the MPI-2 C++ bindings, and provided support for communications of general Python objects. In the latest release, this package is improved to enable direct blocking/non-bloc... MPI for Python provides bindings of the message passing interface (MPI) standard for the Python programming language and allows any Python program to exploit multiple processors. In its first release, MPI for Python was constructed on top of the MPI-1 specification defining an object-oriented interface that closely followed the MPI-2 C++ bindings, and provided support for communications of general Python objects. In the latest release, this package is improved to enable direct blocking/non-blocking communication of numeric arrays, and to support almost all MPI-2 features. Improvements in communication performance have been tested in a Beowulf class cluster. Results showed a negligible overhead in comparison to compiled C code. MPI for Python is open source and available for download on the web (http://mpi4py.scipy.org/).