ExaMPI: A Modern Design and Implementation to Accelerate Message Passing Interface Innovation

The difficulty of deep experimentation with Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementations—which are quite large and complex—substantially raises the cost and complexity of proof-of-concept activities and limits the community of potential contributors to new and better MPI features and implementations alike. Our goal is to enable researchers to experiment rapidly and easily with new concepts, algorithms, and internal protocols for MPI, we introduce ExaMPI, a modern MPI-3.x subset with a robust MPI-4.x roadmap. We discuss design, early implementation, and ongoing utilization in parallel programming research, plus specific research activities enabled by ExaMPI.