Comparing the performance of MPICH with Cray's MPI and with SGI's MPI

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of MPICH with the vendor Message Passing Interface (MPI) on a Cray T3E-900 and an SGI Origin 3000. Seven basic communication tests which include basic point-to-point and collective MPI communication routines were chosen to represent commonly-used communication patterns. Cray's MPI performed better (and sometimes significantly better) than Mississippi State University's (MSU's) MPICH for small and medium messages. They both performed about the same for large messages, however for three tests MSU's MPICH was about 20% faster than Cray's MPI. SGI's MPI performed and scaled better (and sometimes significantly better) than MPICH for all messages, except for the scatter test where MPICH outperformed SGI's MPI for 1 kbyte messages. The poor scalability of MPICH on the Origin 3000 suggests there may be scalability problems with MPICH.