Potential issues

When writing MPI-based applications and executing them on either a multi-core CPU or cluster, the issues one may encounter are very much the same as those we already came across with the multithreaded code in the preceding chapters.

However, an additional worry with MPI is that one relies on the availability of network resources. Since a send buffer used for an MPI_Send call cannot be reclaimed until the network stack can process the buffer, and this call is a blocking type, sending lots of small messages can lead to one process waiting for another, which in turn is waiting for a call to complete.

This type of deadlock should be kept in mind when designing the messaging structure of an MPI application. One can, for example, ensure that there are no send calls building up on one side, which would lead to such a scenario. Providing feedback messages on, queue depth and similar could be used to the ease pressure.

MPI also contains a synchronization mechanism using a so-called...