Publications

Evolving the message passing programming model via a fault-tolerant, object-oriented transport layer

Wilke, Jeremiah J.; Kolla, Hemanth K.; Teranishi, Keita T.; Hollman, David S.; Bennett, Janine C.; Slattengren, Nicole S.

In this position paper, we argue for improved fault-tolerance of an MPI code by introducing lightweight virtualization into the MPI interface. In particular, we outline key-value store semantics for MPI send/recv calls, thereby creating a far more expressive programming model. The general message passing semantics and imperative style of MPI application codes would remain essentially unchanged. However, the additional expressiblity of the programming model 1) enables the underlying transport layer to handle faulttolerance more transparently to the application developer, and 2) provides an evolutionary code path towards more declarative asynchronous programming models. The core contribution of this paper is an initial implementation of the DHARMA transport layer that provides the new, required functionality to support the MPI key-value store model.