Using the Pilot Library: A Fresh Alternative to MPI for HPC Clusters (IEEE TIC-STH 2009)

Speaker: Dr. William Gardner, Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph

Pilot is a new way to program high-performance clusters based on a high-level model featuring processes executing on cluster nodes, and channels for passing messages among them. Designed to smooth the learning curve for novice scientific programmers, the set of library functions is small—less than one-tenth that of MPI—and easy to learn, since the syntax mirrors C’s well-known printf and scanf. The process/channel abstraction inherently reduces the opportunities for communication errors that result in deadlock, and a runtime mechanism detects and diagnoses deadlocks arising from circular waiting. The Pilot library is built as a transparent layer on top of conventional MPI, and shields users from the latter’s complexity while adding minimal overhead.

This tutorial assumes basic exposure to C programming. Familiarity with MPI is not required, but will make the comparisons more meaningful.

Hands-on sessions will work for both onsite and online attendees!

What You Will Learn:

Purpose of Pilot library and conceptual overview Planning, coding, compiling and running a Pilot application Hands-on: Hello World and sample programs Hands-on: Runtime monitor for usage errors, logging, and deadlock detection Patterns in Pilot: master/worker and pipeline Hands-on: Pilot’s collective operations on groups of channels Compare/contrast Pilot and MPI Pilot performance Status and availability of library

Pilot website: http://carmel.cis.uoguelph.ca/pilot/