September 2, 2009, 8:38 pm
Multi-core is on my mind again. I can’t help it. The other day, I was thinking about benchmarking and what I wrote about in Good Enough Will Have To Do. Then it hit me, a possible way out of the multi-core (and GP-GPU) quagmire. Before I reveal my somewhat obvious solution, I need to set the stage.
The typical MPI program is a collection of processes that communicate via messages. These processes can live on the same multi-core node, on another node or a combination of both. Before multi-core there was one or two processes per node. The user often had some control over where his MPI processes would go–either dispersed, one per node or compact, two per node. And, more importantly, the user usually knew what arrangement worked best with his/her codes. With multi-core this has changed a bit…
