MICE: a prototype MPI implementation in Converse environment

Abstract

The paper describes MICE, a prototype implementation of MPI on the Converse interoperable parallel programming environment. It is based on MPICH, a public-domain implementation of MPI and uses the Abstract Device Interface (ADI) which has been retargeted on top of Converse. MICE makes use of message-managers and allows use of thread-objects to let MPI modules co-exist with other types of computations and communication (such as a library computation in Charm++ or asynchronous computations in multipol) within a single application. It also makes it possible to interoperate PVM (in a restricted form) and MPI modules. Thread-objects make it possible to build multi-threaded MPI programs. This MPI implementation demonstrates that it is possible to provide interoperability without any significant performance degradation.