KaMPIng: Flexible and (Near) Zero-Overhead C++ Bindings for MPI

TL;DR

KaMPIng introduces flexible, high-level C++ bindings for MPI that enable rapid development, safety, and near-zero overhead by leveraging template metaprogramming, facilitating easier high-performance distributed computing.

Contribution

The paper presents novel C++ MPI bindings that support all abstraction levels, infer parameters, and ensure safety with minimal overhead using template metaprogramming.

Findings

Supports all MPI abstraction levels with C++ bindings.

Achieves near-zero overhead through compile-time code generation.

Demonstrates effectiveness with diverse application benchmarks.

Abstract

The Message-Passing Interface (MPI) and C++ form the backbone of high-performance computing, but MPI only provides C and Fortran bindings. While this offers great language interoperability, high-level programming languages like C++ make software development quicker and less error-prone. We propose novel C++ language bindings that cover all abstraction levels from low-level MPI calls to convenient STL-style bindings, where most parameters are inferred from a small subset of parameters, by bringing named parameters to C++. This enables rapid prototyping and fine-tuning runtime behavior and memory management. A flexible type system and additional safety guarantees help to prevent programming errors. By exploiting C++'s template metaprogramming capabilities, this has (near) zero overhead, as only required code paths are generated at compile time. We demonstrate that our library is a strong foundation for a future distributed standard library using multiple application benchmarks, ranging from text-book sorting algorithms to phylogenetic interference.