Toward Asynchronous and MPI-Interoperable Active Messages

Many new large-scale applications have emerged recently and become important in areas such as bioinformatics and social networks. These applications are often data-intensive and involve irregular communication patterns and complex operations on remote processes. Active messages have proven effective for parallelizing such nontraditional applications. However, most current active messages frameworks are low-level and system specific, do not efficiently support asynchronous progress, and are not interoperable with two-sided and collective communications. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an active messages framework inside MPI to provide portability and programmability, and we explore challenges when asynchronously handling active messages and other messages from the network as well as from shared memory. We test our implementation with a set of comprehensive benchmarks. Evaluation results show that our framework has the advantages of overlapping and interoperability, while introducing only a modest overhead.