The pilot library for novice MPI programmers

Abstract

The Pilot library is a new method for programming MPI-enabled clusters in C, targeted at novice parallel programmers. Formal elements from Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) are used to realize a process/channel model of parallel computation that reduces opportunities for deadlock and other communication errors. This simple model, plus an application programming interface (API) styled after C's formatted I/O, are designed to make the library easy to learn. The Pilot library exists as a thin layer on top of any standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation, preserving MPI's portability and efficiency, with little performance overhead arising as result of Pilot's additional features. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).