Efficient Message Passing on Multi-Clusters: An IPv6 Extension to Open MPI

Abstract

At our university, different institutes have installed their own cluster computers. Connecting several of these clusters to perform distributed high-performance computing requires message passing spanning heterogeneous network structures. One problem is that private IPv4 addresses inside clusters, although common and suitable for internal communication, preclude end-to-end connectivity. To establish multi-cluster message passing in such a context, we propose to use MPI over IPv6. In this article, we present our IPv6 extension to Open MPI, which is able to cope with mixed IPv4/IPv6 environments and delivers high performance levels.