An overview of CMPI: network performance aware MPI in the cloud

Cloud computing enables users to perform distributed computing tasks on many virtual machines, without owning a physical cluster. Recently, various distributed computing tasks such as scientific applications are being moved from supercomputers and private clusters to public clouds. Message passing interface (MPI) is a key and common component in distributed computing tasks. The virtualized computing environment of the public cloud hides the network topology information from the users, and existing topology-aware optimizations for MPI are no longer feasible in the cloud environment. We propose a network performance aware MPI library named CMPI. CMPI embraces a new model for capturing the network performance among different virtual machines in the cloud. Based on the network performance model, we develop novel network performance aware algorithms for communication operations. This poster gives an overview of CMPI design, and presents some preliminary results on collective operations such as broadcast.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our network performance aware optimizations on Amazon EC2.