Introduction to MPI

Additional features

Until now we have seen all the basic commands to communicate between process grouped on MPI_COMM_WORLD. This last chapter treats of additional topics that would not fit in a proper chapter by themselves. The choice to put all these topic here is entirely subjective and could be considered arbitrary. Now as this course aims at giving you a first taste of MPI and the right tools to be able to develop a complete program from scratch and understanding the basic mechanisms of MPI, it felt less necessary to have an in-depth covering of communicators or custom-types. This is why they are quickly covered in this section. Further explanation of these topics might be the subject of a future advanced MPI-course.

This section will cover three topics :

• Communicator splitting
• Time measurement
• Custom type definition

The section ends with a list of interesting features of MPI that we have not covered in this course.