[Beowulf] MPICH vs MPICH2

[Rob Ross]

MPICH2 does not support heterogeneous collections of architectures as 
MPICH does; that's the only reason why one wouldn't want to switch.

Regards,

Rob

Robert Latham wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 03:30:09PM +0800, John Lau wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>Does anyone compare the different between MPICH and MPICH2? What are the
>>greatest new features in MPICH2? And does the MPICH2 have large
>>performance increase than MPICH? I would like to see some benchmarks
>>that compare them.
> 
> 
> Well, the foremost differnce between MPICH and MPICH2 is that MPICH2
> implementes MPI-2, whereas MPICH implmented only MPI-1 and MPI-IO.  
> 
> MPICH2 has improved datatype handling routines 
> 
> 	R. Ross, N. Miller, and W. Gropp, "Implementing Fast and
> 	Reusable Datatype Processing," Proceedings of EuroPVM/MPI
> 	2003, Venice, Italy, September, 2003.
> 
> MPICH2 has excellent performance for one-sided opeerations.  Hard to
> compare with MPICH on this one, but there are benchmarks where MPICH2  
> compares favorably with other MPI-2 implementations.
> 
> 	R. Thakur, W. Gropp, and B. Toonen, "Minimizing
> 	Synchronization Overhead in the Implementation of MPI
> 	One-Sided Communication", Proceedings of the 11th European
> 	PVM/MPI Users' Group Conference (Euro PVM/MPI 2004), September
> 	2004.
> 
> I can't find the data to back this up but MPICH2 does perform better
> than MPICH1 in point-to-point messaging (as measured by NetPIPE).  28%
> faster for an 8MB message.  
> 
> I hope that's enough to entice you into trying MPICH2.  I work with
> the MPICH2 folks, so I'm a little biased, but it's a quality
> implementation.
> 
> ==rob
>