Programming Using the

Message Passing Paradigm

Ananth Grama, Anshul Gupta,

George Karypis, and Vipin Kumar

To accompany the text ``Introduction to Parallel Computing'',

Addison Wesley, 2003.

Tutorial — MPI for Python 3.1.5 documentation (mpi4py.readthedocs.io)

 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

 Principles of Message-Passing Programming
• The logical view of a machine supporting the message-passing
paradigm consists of p processes, each with its own exclusive
address space.

• Each data element must belong to one of the partitions of the

space; hence, data must be explicitly partitioned and placed.

• All interactions (read-only or read/write) require cooperation of

two processes - the process that has the data and the process that
wants to access the data.

• These two constraints, while onerous, make underlying costs very

explicit to the programmer.
 Principles of Message-Passing Programming
• Message-passing programs are often written using the
asynchronous or loosely synchronous paradigms.

• In the asynchronous paradigm, all concurrent tasks execute

asynchronously.

• In the loosely synchronous model, tasks or subsets of tasks

synchronize to perform interactions. Between these interactions,
tasks execute completely asynchronously.

• Most message-passing programs are written using the single

program multiple data (SPMD) model.
 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations
• The prototypes of these operations are as follows:
send(void *sendbuf, int nelems, int dest)
receive(void *recvbuf, int nelems, int source)

• Consider the following code segments:

P0 P1
a = 100; receive(&a, 1, 0)
send(&a, 1, 1); printf("%d\n", a);
a = 0;

• The semantics of the send operation require that the value

received by process P1 must be 100 as opposed to 0.

• This motivates the design of the send and receive protocols.

Non-Buffered Blocking Message Passing Operations
• A simple method for forcing send/receive semantics is for the send
operation to return only when it is safe to do so.

• In the non-buffered blocking send, the operation does not return until
the matching receive has been encountered at the receiving process.

• Idling and deadlocks are major issues with non-buffered blocking

sends.

• In buffered blocking sends, the sender simply copies the data into the
designated buffer and returns after the copy operation has been
completed. The data is copied at a buffer at the receiving end as well.

• Buffering alleviates idling at the expense of copying overheads.

Non-Buffered Blocking Message Passing Operations

Handshake for a blocking non-buffered send/receive operation.

It is easy to see that in cases where sender and receiver do not
reach communication point at similar times, there can be
considerable idling overheads.
Buffered Blocking Message Passing Operations
• A simple solution to the idling and deadlocking problem outlined
above is to rely on buffers at the sending and receiving ends.

• The sender simply copies the data into the designated buffer and
returns after the copy operation has been completed.

• The data must be buffered at the receiving end as well.

• Buffering trades off idling overhead for buffer copying overhead.

Buffered Blocking Message Passing Operations

Blocking buffered transfer protocols: (a) in the presence of

communication hardware with buffers at send and receive ends;
and (b) in the absence of communication hardware, sender
interrupts receiver and deposits data in buffer at receiver end.
Buffered Blocking Message Passing Operations
Bounded buffer sizes can have signicant impact on performance.

P0 P1
for (i = 0; i < 1000; i++){ for (i = 0; i < 1000; i++){
produce_data(&a); receive(&a, 1, 0);
send(&a, 1, 1); consume_data(&a);
} }

What if consumer was much slower than producer?

Buffered Blocking Message Passing Operations
Deadlocks are still possible with buffering since receive
operations block.

P0 P1
receive(&a, 1, 1); receive(&a, 1, 0);
send(&b, 1, 1); send(&b, 1, 0);
 Non-Blocking Message Passing Operations
• The programmer must ensure semantics of the send and receive.

• This class of non-blocking protocols returns from the send or

receive operation before it is semantically safe to do so.

• Non-blocking operations are generally accompanied by a check-

status operation.

• When used correctly, these primitives are capable of overlapping

communication overheads with useful computations.

• Message passing libraries typically provide both blocking and

non-blocking primitives.
Non-Blocking Message Passing Operations

Non-blocking non-buffered send and receive operations (a) in

absence of communication hardware; (b) in presence of
communication hardware.
 Send and Receive Protocols

Space of possible protocols for send and receive operations.

 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

 MPI: the Message Passing Interface
• MPI defines a standard library for message-passing that can be
used to develop portable message-passing programs using either C
or Fortran.

• The MPI standard defines both the syntax as well as the semantics
of a core set of library routines.

• Vendor implementations of MPI are available on almost all

commercial parallel computers.

• It is possible to write fully-functional message-passing programs

by using only the six routines.
 MPI: the Message Passing Interface
The minimal set of MPI routines.

MPI_Init Initializes MPI.

MPI_Finalize Terminates MPI.
MPI_Comm_size Determines the number of processes.
MPI_Comm_rank Determines the label of calling process.
MPI_Send Sends a message.
MPI_Recv Receives a message.
 Starting and Terminating the MPI Library
• MPI_Init is called prior to any calls to other MPI routines. Its purpose is to
initialize the MPI environment.

• MPI_Finalize is called at the end of the computation, and it performs

various clean-up tasks to terminate the MPI environment.

• The prototypes of these two functions are:

int MPI_Init(int *argc, char ***argv)
int MPI_Finalize()

• MPI_Init also strips off any MPI related command-line arguments.

• All MPI routines, data-types, and constants are prefixed by “MPI_”. The return
code for successful completion is MPI_SUCCESS.
 Communicators
• A communicator defines a communication domain - a set of
processes that are allowed to communicate with each other.

• Information about communication domains is stored in variables of

type MPI_Comm.

• Communicators are used as arguments to all message transfer MPI

routines.

• A process can belong to many different (possibly overlapping)

communication domains.

• MPI defines a default communicator called MPI_COMM_WORLD

which includes all the processes.
 Querying Information
• The MPI_Comm_size and MPI_Comm_rank functions are
used to determine the number of processes and the label of the
calling process, respectively.

• The calling sequences of these routines are as follows:

int MPI_Comm_size(MPI_Comm comm, int *size)
int MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_Comm comm, int *rank)

• The rank of a process is an integer that ranges from zero up to the

size of the communicator minus one.
 Our First MPI Program

#include <mpi.h>

main(int argc, char *argv[])

{
int npes, myrank;
MPI_Init(&argc, &argv);
MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &npes);
MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &myrank);
printf("From process %d out of %d, Hello World!\n",
myrank, npes);
MPI_Finalize();
}
 Sending and Receiving Messages
• The basic functions for sending and receiving messages in MPI are the
MPI_Send and MPI_Recv, respectively.

• The calling sequences of these routines are as follows:

int MPI_Send(void *buf, int count, MPI_Datatype
datatype, int dest, int tag, MPI_Comm comm)
int MPI_Recv(void *buf, int count, MPI_Datatype
datatype, int source, int tag,
MPI_Comm comm, MPI_Status *status)

• MPI provides equivalent datatypes for all C datatypes. This is done for portability
reasons.

• The datatype MPI_BYTE corresponds to a byte (8 bits) and MPI_PACKED

corresponds to a collection of data items that has been created by packing non-
contiguous data.

• The message-tag can take values ranging from zero up to the MPI defined constant
MPI_TAG_UB.
 MPI Datatypes
MPI Datatype C Datatype
MPI_CHAR signed char
MPI_SHORT signed short int
MPI_INT signed int
MPI_LONG signed long int
MPI_UNSIGNED_CHAR unsigned char
MPI_UNSIGNED_SHORT unsigned short int
MPI_UNSIGNED unsigned int
MPI_UNSIGNED_LONG unsigned long int
MPI_FLOAT float
MPI_DOUBLE double
MPI_LONG_DOUBLE long double
MPI_BYTE
MPI_PACKED
 Sending and Receiving Messages
• MPI allows specification of wildcard arguments for both source
and tag.

• If source is set to MPI_ANY_SOURCE, then any process of the

communication domain can be the source of the message.

• If tag is set to MPI_ANY_TAG, then messages with any tag are

accepted.

• On the receive side, the message must be of length equal to or less

than the length field specified.
 Sending and Receiving Messages
• On the receiving end, the status variable can be used to get
information about the MPI_Recv operation.

• The corresponding data structure contains:

typedef struct MPI_Status {
int MPI_SOURCE;
int MPI_TAG;
int MPI_ERROR; };

• The MPI_Get_count function returns the precise count of data

items received.
int MPI_Get_count(MPI_Status *status, MPI_Datatype
datatype, int *count)
 Avoiding Deadlocks

Consider:

int a[10], b[10], myrank;

MPI_Status status;
...
MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &myrank);
if (myrank == 0) {
MPI_Send(a, 10, MPI_INT, 1, 1, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Send(b, 10, MPI_INT, 1, 2, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
}
else if (myrank == 1) {
MPI_Recv(b, 10, MPI_INT, 0, 2, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Recv(a, 10, MPI_INT, 0, 1, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
}
...

If MPI_Send is blocking, there is a deadlock.

 Avoiding Deadlocks

Consider the following piece of code, in which process i

sends a message to process i + 1 (modulo the number of
processes) and receives a message from process i - 1
(module the number of processes).
int a[10], b[10], npes, myrank;
MPI_Status status;
...
MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &npes);
MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &myrank);
MPI_Send(a, 10, MPI_INT, (myrank+1)%npes, 1,
MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Recv(b, 10, MPI_INT, (myrank-1+npes)%npes, 1,
MPI_COMM_WORLD);
...

Once again, we have a deadlock if MPI_Send is blocking.

 Avoiding Deadlocks

We can break the circular wait to avoid deadlocks as follows:

int a[10], b[10], npes, myrank;
MPI_Status status;
...
MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &npes);
MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &myrank);
if (myrank%2 == 1) {
MPI_Send(a, 10, MPI_INT, (myrank+1)%npes, 1,
MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Recv(b, 10, MPI_INT, (myrank-1+npes)%npes, 1,
MPI_COMM_WORLD);
}
else {
MPI_Recv(b, 10, MPI_INT, (myrank-1+npes)%npes, 1,
MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Send(a, 10, MPI_INT, (myrank+1)%npes, 1,
MPI_COMM_WORLD);
}
...
Sending and Receiving Messages Simultaneously

To exchange messages, MPI provides the following function:

int MPI_Sendrecv(void *sendbuf, int sendcount,
MPI_Datatype senddatatype, int dest, int
sendtag, void *recvbuf, int recvcount,
MPI_Datatype recvdatatype, int source, int recvtag,
MPI_Comm comm, MPI_Status *status)

The arguments include arguments to the send and receive

functions. If we wish to use the same buffer for both send and
receive, we can use:
int MPI_Sendrecv_replace(void *buf, int count,
MPI_Datatype datatype, int dest, int sendtag,
int source, int recvtag, MPI_Comm comm,
MPI_Status *status)
 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

 Topologies and Embeddings
• MPI allows a programmer to organize processors into logical k-d
meshes.

• The processor ids in MPI_COMM_WORLD can be mapped to other

communicators (corresponding to higher-dimensional meshes) in
many ways.

• The goodness of any such mapping is determined by the

interaction pattern of the underlying program and the topology of
the machine.

• MPI does not provide the programmer any control over these
mappings.
 Topologies and Embeddings

Different ways to map a set of processes to a two-dimensional grid.

(a) and (b) show a row- and column-wise mapping of these processes,

(c) shows a mapping that follows a space-lling curve (dotted line), and

(d) shows a mapping in which neighboring processes are directly connected in a hypercube.
 Creating and Using Cartesian Topologies
• We can create cartesian topologies using the function:
int MPI_Cart_create(MPI_Comm comm_old, int ndims,
int *dims, int *periods, int reorder,
MPI_Comm *comm_cart)

This function takes the processes in the old communicator and

creates a new communicator with dims dimensions.

• Each processor can now be identified in this new cartesian

topology by a vector of dimension dims.
 Creating and Using Cartesian Topologies
• Since sending and receiving messages still require (one-
dimensional) ranks, MPI provides routines to convert ranks to
cartesian coordinates and vice-versa.
int MPI_Cart_coord(MPI_Comm comm_cart, int rank, int maxdims,
int *coords)
int MPI_Cart_rank(MPI_Comm comm_cart, int *coords, int *rank)

• The most common operation on cartesian topologies is a shift. To

determine the rank of source and destination of such shifts, MPI
provides the following function:
int MPI_Cart_shift(MPI_Comm comm_cart, int dir, int s_step,
int *rank_source, int *rank_dest)
 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

Overlapping Communication with Computation
• In order to overlap communication with computation, MPI provides a pair of
functions for performing non-blocking send and receive operations.
int MPI_Isend(void *buf, int count, MPI_Datatype datatype,
int dest, int tag, MPI_Comm comm,
MPI_Request *request)

int MPI_Irecv(void *buf, int count, MPI_Datatype datatype,

int source, int tag, MPI_Comm comm,
MPI_Request *request)

• These operations return before the operations have been completed. Function
MPI_Test tests whether or not the non-blocking send or receive operation identified
by its request has finished.
int MPI_Test(MPI_Request *request, int *flag,
MPI_Status *status)

• MPI_Wait waits for the operation to complete.

int MPI_Wait(MPI_Request *request, MPI_Status *status)

 Avoiding Deadlocks

Using non-blocking operations remove most deadlocks. Consider:

int a[10], b[10], myrank;

MPI_Status status;
...
MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &myrank);
if (myrank == 0) {
MPI_Send(a, 10, MPI_INT, 1, 1, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Send(b, 10, MPI_INT, 1, 2, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
}
else if (myrank == 1) {
MPI_Recv(b, 10, MPI_INT, 0, 2, &status, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Recv(a, 10, MPI_INT, 0, 1, &status, MPI_COMM_WORLD);
}
...

Replacing either the send or the receive operations with non-blocking

counterparts fixes this deadlock.
 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

Collective Communication and Computation Operations
• MPI provides an extensive set of functions for performing
common collective communication operations.

• Each of these operations is defined over a group corresponding to

the communicator.

• All processors in a communicator must call these operations.

 Collective Communication Operations
• The barrier synchronization operation is performed in MPI using:
int MPI_Barrier(MPI_Comm comm)

• The one-to-all broadcast operation is:

int MPI_Bcast(void *buf, int count, MPI_Datatype datatype,
int source, MPI_Comm comm)

• The all-to-one reduction operation is:

int MPI_Reduce(void *sendbuf, void *recvbuf, int count,
MPI_Datatype datatype, MPI_Op op, int target,
MPI_Comm comm)
 Predefined Reduction Operations
Operation Meaning Datatypes
MPI_MAX Maximum C integers and floating point
MPI_MIN Minimum C integers and floating point
MPI_SUM Sum C integers and floating point
MPI_PROD Product C integers and floating point
MPI_LAND Logical AND C integers
MPI_BAND Bit-wise AND C integers and byte
MPI_LOR Logical OR C integers
MPI_BOR Bit-wise OR C integers and byte
MPI_LXOR Logical XOR C integers
MPI_BXOR Bit-wise XOR C integers and byte
MPI_MAXLOC max-min value-location Data-pairs
MPI_MINLOC min-min value-location Data-pairs
 Collective Communication Operations
• The operation MPI_MAXLOC combines pairs of values (vi, li) and returns the pair
(v, l) such that v is the maximum among all vi 's and l is the corresponding li (if
there are more than one, it is the smallest among all these li 's).

• MPI_MINLOC does the same, except for minimum value of vi.

An example use of the MPI_MINLOC and MPI_MAXLOC operators.

Collective Communication Operations
MPI datatypes for data-pairs used with the MPI_MAXLOC
and MPI_MINLOC reduction operations.

MPI Datatype C Datatype

MPI_2INT pair of ints
MPI_SHORT_INT short and int
MPI_LONG_INT long and int
MPI_LONG_DOUBLE_INT long double and int
MPI_FLOAT_INT float and int
MPI_DOUBLE_INT double and int
 Collective Communication Operations
• If the result of the reduction operation is needed by all processes,
MPI provides:
int MPI_Allreduce(void *sendbuf, void *recvbuf,
int count, MPI_Datatype datatype, MPI_Op
op, MPI_Comm comm)

• To compute prefix-sums, MPI provides:

int MPI_Scan(void *sendbuf, void *recvbuf, int count,
MPI_Datatype datatype, MPI_Op op,
MPI_Comm comm)
 Collective Communication Operations
• The gather operation is performed in MPI using:
int MPI_Gather(void *sendbuf, int sendcount,
MPI_Datatype senddatatype, void *recvbuf,
int recvcount, MPI_Datatype recvdatatype,
int target, MPI_Comm comm)

• MPI also provides the MPI_Allgather function in which the data are gathered at
all the processes.
int MPI_Allgather(void *sendbuf, int sendcount,
MPI_Datatype senddatatype, void *recvbuf,
int recvcount, MPI_Datatype recvdatatype,
MPI_Comm comm)

• The corresponding scatter operation is:

int MPI_Scatter(void *sendbuf, int sendcount,
MPI_Datatype senddatatype, void *recvbuf,
int recvcount, MPI_Datatype recvdatatype,
int source, MPI_Comm comm)
 Collective Communication Operations
• The all-to-all personalized communication operation is performed
by:
int MPI_Alltoall(void *sendbuf, int sendcount,
MPI_Datatype senddatatype, void *recvbuf,
int recvcount, MPI_Datatype recvdatatype,
MPI_Comm comm)

• Using this core set of collective operations, a number of programs

can be greatly simplified.
 Topic Overview

• Principles of Message-Passing Programming

• The Building Blocks: Send and Receive Operations

• MPI: the Message Passing Interface

• Topologies and Embedding

• Overlapping Communication with Computation

• Collective Communication and Computation Operations

• Groups and Communicators

 Groups and Communicators
• In many parallel algorithms, communication operations need to be
restricted to certain subsets of processes.
• MPI provides mechanisms for partitioning the group of processes
that belong to a communicator into subgroups each corresponding
to a different communicator.
• The simplest such mechanism is:
int MPI_Comm_split(MPI_Comm comm, int color, int key,
MPI_Comm *newcomm)
• This operation groups processors by color and sorts resulting
groups on the key.
 Groups and Communicators

Using MPI_Comm_split to split a group of processes

in a communicator into subgroups.
 Groups and Communicators
• In many parallel algorithms, processes are arranged in a virtual grid, and in
different steps of the algorithm, communication needs to be restricted to a
different subset of the grid.
• MPI provides a convenient way to partition a Cartesian topology to form lower-
dimensional grids:
int MPI_Cart_sub(MPI_Comm comm_cart, int *keep_dims,
MPI_Comm *comm_subcart)
• If keep_dims[i] is true (non-zero value in C) then the ith dimension is
retained in the new sub-topology.
• The coordinate of a process in a sub-topology created by MPI_Cart_sub can
be obtained from its coordinate in the original topology by disregarding the
coordinates that correspond to the dimensions that were not retained.
 Groups and Communicators

Splitting a Cartesian topology of size 2 x 4 x 7 into (a) four

subgroups of size 2 x 1 x 7, and (b) eight subgroups of
size 1 x 1 x 7.