Implementing True MPI Sessions and Evaluating MPI Initialization Scalability

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Hui, Raffenetti, Kenneth, Guo, Yanfei, Wilkins, Michael, Thakur, Rajeev
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhou, Hui
Raffenetti, Kenneth
Guo, Yanfei
Wilkins, Michael
Thakur, Rajeev
author_facet Zhou, Hui
Raffenetti, Kenneth
Guo, Yanfei
Wilkins, Michael
Thakur, Rajeev
contents Sessions is one of the major features introduced in the MPI-4 standard. It offers an alternative to the traditional world communicator model by allowing applications to construct communicators from process sets, thereby eliminating the dependency on MPI_COMM_WORLD. The Sessions model was proposed as a more scalable solution for exascale systems, where MPI_COMM_WORLD was viewed as a potential scalability bottleneck. However, supporting Sessions is a significant challenge for established codebases like MPICH due to the deep integration of the world model in traditional MPI implementations. Although MPICH added support for the MPI-4 standard upon its release, it still internally relied on a global world communicator. This approach enabled applications written using the Sessions model to function, but it did not fulfill the full design intent of Sessions, which meant to decouple MPI from MPI_COMM_WORLD. We describe MPICH effort to support true MPI Sessions, including a major internal refactoring. We describe the architectural changes required to support true Sessions and evaluate the resulting implementation scalability. Our results demonstrate that true Sessions can offer significant scalability benefits by adopting explicit hierarchical designs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_03983
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Implementing True MPI Sessions and Evaluating MPI Initialization Scalability
Zhou, Hui
Raffenetti, Kenneth
Guo, Yanfei
Wilkins, Michael
Thakur, Rajeev
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Sessions is one of the major features introduced in the MPI-4 standard. It offers an alternative to the traditional world communicator model by allowing applications to construct communicators from process sets, thereby eliminating the dependency on MPI_COMM_WORLD. The Sessions model was proposed as a more scalable solution for exascale systems, where MPI_COMM_WORLD was viewed as a potential scalability bottleneck. However, supporting Sessions is a significant challenge for established codebases like MPICH due to the deep integration of the world model in traditional MPI implementations. Although MPICH added support for the MPI-4 standard upon its release, it still internally relied on a global world communicator. This approach enabled applications written using the Sessions model to function, but it did not fulfill the full design intent of Sessions, which meant to decouple MPI from MPI_COMM_WORLD. We describe MPICH effort to support true MPI Sessions, including a major internal refactoring. We describe the architectural changes required to support true Sessions and evaluate the resulting implementation scalability. Our results demonstrate that true Sessions can offer significant scalability benefits by adopting explicit hierarchical designs.
title Implementing True MPI Sessions and Evaluating MPI Initialization Scalability
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03983