MPI for Python Performance improvements and MPI-2 extensions .pdf

J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 68 (2008) 655 –662 /locate/jpdc MPI for Python: Performance improvements and MPI-2 extensions Lisandro Dalcín ∗, Rodrigo Paz, Mario Storti, Jorge D’Elía Centro Internacional de Métodos Computacionales en Ingeniería (CIMEC), Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química (INTEC), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL), (S3000GLN) Santa Fe, Argentina Received 16 November 2006; received in revised form 20 July 2007; accepted 12 September 2007 Available online 7 October 2007 Abstract 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 (/). © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Message passing; MPI; High-level languages; Parallel Python 1. Introduction visualization. They are alleviated of