A Comparative Study of the MPI Communication Primitives on a Cluster

MPI (Message Passing Interface) has become the de facto standard for implementing parallel programs on distributed systems. In MPI, the two basic communication primitives are point-to-point communication and broadcast respectively. In this paper, the authors evaluate and compare the performance of broadcast with point-to-point communication (both blocking and non-blocking) of the MPI-1 standard library on a cluster computer in communicating the same data block among all processors. The performance in terms of delay is compared by varying the number of processors, and the data block size.