MGF: A grid-enabled MPI library

Computational Grids allow access to several computing resources interconnected in a distributed heterogeneous infrastructure for parallel computing. This powerful resource aggregation increases the application runtime environment complexity. A simple programming model, capable of hiding this complexity, facilitates the use of Grid technology in high-performance computing. The Message Passing Interface can play this role and makes the Grid more accessible to developers with parallel programming skills. In this paper we present MGF, a grid-enabled MPI implementation which extends the existing MPICH-G2. MGF aims are: to allow parallel MPI applications to be executed on Grids without source code modifications; to give programmers a detailed view of the execution system network topology; to use the most efficient channel available for point-to-point communications and finally, to improve collective operation efficiency by introducing a delegation mechanism.