Investigating the Feasibility of an MPI-like Library Implemented in .Net Using Only Fully Managed Code

The .Net development platform and the C# language, in particular, offer many benefits to programmers including increased productivity, security, reliability and robustness, as well as standards-based application portability and cross-language inter-operation. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardised high performance computing paradigm with efficient, frequently-used implementations in many popular languages. A partial implementation of McMPI, the first MPI-like library to be targeted at .Net and written in pure C#, is presented. It is sufficiently complete to demonstrate typical application code and to evaluate relative performance. Although the effective bandwidth for large messages (over 100 Kbytes) using 100Mbit/s Ethernet is good, the overheads introduced by .Net remoting and object serialisation are shown to result in high latency and to limit bandwidth to 166Mbit/s when using a 1Gbit/s Ethernet interconnection. A possible resolution that still uses pure C#, i.e. using .Net sockets, is proposed but not implemented.