Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

MPI support is nearly ubiquitous on high-performance systems today and is generally highly tuned for performance. It would thus seem to offer a convenient ‘portable network assembly language’ to developers of parallel programming languages who wish to target different network architectures. Unfortunately, neither the traditional MPI 1.1 API nor the newer MPI 2.0 extensions for one-sided communication provide an adequate compilation target for global address space languages, and this is likely to be the case for many other parallel languages as well. Simulating one-sided communication under the MPI 1.1 API is too expensive, while the MPI 2.0 one-sided API imposes a number of significant restrictions on memory access patterns that would need to be incorporated at the language level, as a compiler cannot effectively hide them given current conflict and alias detection algorithms. © 2004 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.