Best Effort MPI/RT as an Alternative to MPI: Design and Performance Comparison

Abstract

The Real-Time Message Passing Interface (MPI/RT) is an emerging real-time communications middleware standard for distributed real-time applications. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the de facto standard for high performance parallel application development. In this thesis, we describe how MPI/RT with best effort quality of service can be used as an alternative for MPI. Mercury Computer Systems\u27 RACE embedded parallel computer is used as the platform for comparison of design and performance of these two standards. The main advantages MPI/RT has over MPI are its explicit support for communication channels and its emphasis on early binding. Design and implementation of best effort MPI/RT on Mercury is described and its performance is compared with MPI in order to illustrate how MPI/RT features allow implementations to exploit the underlying platform more optimally. The results for the benchmarks show that MPI/RT outperforms MPI in almost all cases examined