A virtual test environment for MPI development: Quick answers to many small questions

Abstract

MPI implementations are faced with growingly complex network configurations containing multiple network interfaces per node, NAT, or dual stacks. To implement handling logic correctly, thorough testing is necessary. However, the cost of providing such diverse setups in real hardware is prohibitively high, resulting in a lack of testing. In this article, we present a Virtual Test Environment (VTE) that considerably lowers this barrier by providing complex network environments on a single computer and thus enables testing in situations where it otherwise would not be feasible. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.