Flattening on the Fly: Efficient Handling of MPI Derived Datatypes

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) incorporates a mechanism for describing structured, non-contiguous memory layouts for use as communication buffers in MPI communication functions. The rationale behind the derived datatype mechanism is to alleviate the user from tedious packing and unpacking of non-consecutive data into contiguous communication buffers. Furthermore, the mechanism makes it possible to improve performance by saving on internal buffering. Apparently, current MPI implementations entail considerable performance penalties when working with derived datatypes. We describe a new method called flattening on the fly for the efficient handling of derived datatypes in MPI. The method aims at exploiting regularities in the memory layout described by the datatype as far as possible. In addition it considerably reduces the overhead for parsing the datatype. Flattening on the fly has been implemented and evaluated on an NEC SX-4 vector supercomputer. On the SX-4 flattening on the fly performs significantly better than previous methods, resulting in performance comparable to what the user can in the best case achieve by packing and unpacking data manually. Also on a PC cluster the method gives worthwhile improvements in cases that are not handled well by the conventional implementation.