Architecture of LA-MPI, a network-fault-tolerant MPI

Abstract

Summary form only given. We discuss the unique architectural elements of the Los Alamos message passing interface (LA-MPI), a high-performance, network-fault-tolerant, thread-safe MPI library. LA-MPI is designed for use on terascale clusters which are inherently unreliable due to their sheer number of system components and trade-offs between cost and performance. We examine in detail the design concepts used to implement LA-MPI. These include reliability features, such as application-level checksumming, message retransmission, and automatic message rerouting. Other key performance enhancing features, such as concurrent message routing over multiple, diverse network adapters and protocols, and communication-specific optimizations (e.g., shared memory) are examined.