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Derek Groen edited this page Oct 5, 2016 · 21 revisions

MPWide logo

MPWide is a light-weight communication library for distributed computing. It is specifically developed to allow message passing over long-distance networks using path-specific optimizations. It has been incorporated in the MUSCLE2 coupling environment, and has been primarily used to parallelize cosmological simulations and bloodflow simulations across sites.

A complete overview of MPWide can be found in our contribution to the Journal of Open Research Software (see http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jors.ah).

Background

The latest version is available here. The 1.0 version of MPWide has been used in the Gravitational Billion Body Project to allow simulations across multiple supercomputers. More information on this can be found at: http://iopscience.iop.org/1749-4699/4/1/015001 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.5559. In addition, we used the 1.2.1 version to couple two blood flow codes across a wide area network (http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.2963).

As of 2014, MPWide is actively maintained and supported, and we have integrated it in the MUSCLE 2 coupling environment (see: http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5740). Suggestions for further improvement are always welcome.

We have also published a paper specifically about MPWide in Computational Science and Discovery in 2010. This paper can be found at http://iopscience.iop.org/1749-4699/3/1/015002, or http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.2767 for the pre-print.

Documentation

We provide basic documentation in the paper on MPWide, as well as in the User Manual supplied with the code. In addition, we have held a tutorial session during the MAPPER Summer School in Barcelona in 2013. The content of that tutorial can be found at: http://www.mapper-project.eu/web/guest/mpwide1.

Current use

MPWide is embedded in MUSCLE2, which is used for example in the ComPat project (www.compat-project.eu). In addition, there are two student projects ongoing which rely on MPWide: one in the area of astrophysics and one on coupling agent-based models.

Citing MPWide

We recommend citing MPWide as follows:

Groen, D, Rieder, S and Portegies Zwart, S. MPWide: a light-weight library for efficient message passing over wide area networks. Journal of Open Research Software 1(1):e9, 2013. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jors.ah

BibTeX:

@article{mpwideJORS,

  author = {Groen, D. and Rieder, S. and Portegies Zwart, S.},

  title = {MPWide: a light-weight library for efficient message passing over wide area networks},

  journal = {Journal of Open Research Software},

  volume = {1},

  number = {1},

  year = {2013}

}