Design and implementation of a high-performance MPI for C# and the common language infrastructure

  • Authors:

  • Douglas Gregor;Andrew Lumsdaine

  • Affiliations:

  • Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

As high-performance computing enters the mainstream, parallel programming mechanisms (including the Message Passing Interface, or MPI) must be supported in new environments such as C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). Making effective use of MPI with the CLI requires an interface that reflects the high-level object-oriented nature of C# and that also supports its programming idioms. However, for performance reasons, this high-level functionality must ultimately be mapped to low-level native MPI libraries. In addition to abstraction penalty concerns, avoiding unwanted overhead in this mapping process is significantly complicated by the safety and portability features of the CLI virtual machine, such as garbage collection and just-in-time compilation. In this paper, we describe our approach to using features of C# and the CLI---such as reflection, unsafe code regions, and run-time code generation---to realize an elegant, yet highly efficient, C# interface to MPI. Experimental results demonstrate that there is no appreciable overhead introduced by our approach when compared to the native MS-MPI library.