MPI y POSIX (lab)

What is MPI?

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers. The standard defines the syntax and semantics of a core of library routines useful to a wide range of users writing portable message-passing programs in Fortran 77 or the C programming language. Several well-tested and efficient implementations of MPI include some that are free and in the public domain. These fostered the development of a parallel software industry, and there encouraged development of portable and scalable large-scale parallel applications.

Functionality

The MPI interface is meant to provide essential virtual topology, synchronization, and communication functionality between a set of processes (that have been mapped to nodes/servers/computer instances) in a language-independent way, with language-specific syntax (bindings), plus a few language-specific features. MPI programs always work with processes, but programmers commonly refer to the processes as processors. Typically, for maximum performance, each CPU (or core in a multi-core machine) will be assigned just a single process. This assignment happens at runtime through the agent that starts the MPI program, normally called mpirun or mpiexec.

What is POSIX?

Short for "Portable Operating System Interface for uni-X", POSIX is a set of standards codified by the IEEE and issued by ANSI and ISO. The goal of POSIX is to ease the task of cross-platform software development by establishing a set of guidelines for operating system vendors to follow. Ideally, a developer should have to write a program only once to run on all POSIX-compliant systems. Most modern commercial Unix implementations and many free ones are POSIX compliant. There are actually several different POSIX releases, but the most important are POSIX.1 and POSIX.2, which define system calls and command-line interface, respectively.

The POSIX specifications describe an operating system that is similar to, but not necessarily the same as, Unix. Though POSIX is heavily based on the BSD and System V releases, non-Unix systems such as Microsoft's Windows NT and IBM's OpenEdition MVS are POSIX compliant.