JuliaCon 2020 (times are in UTC)

MPI.jl: Julia meets classic HPC
07-29, 18:40–18:50 (UTC), Purple Track

The MPI.jl package provides a standard Julia interface for working with the Message Passing Interface (MPI). In this talk I will introduce the package and illustrate its use with some examples, describe some of the unique challenges it faces, and detail plans for the future to make it easier to use.


Over 25 years old, MPI is the stalwart of high-performance computing, supported on everything from single machines to billion-dollar supercomputers. Despite its age, it supports several different modes of communication, and lots of engineering effort goes into optimizing bandwidth and reducing latency. However its use with a dynamic language such as Julia presents certain challenges.

I’ll start with some simple examples on how its single program, multiple data (SPMD) programming model can be used with Julia. Then I will discuss some implementation details, and highlight some of the unique challenges in supporting this package, from a lack of a standardised application binary interface (ABI), supporting optional CUDA-aware interfaces, and working with specific Julia features, like custom data types and reduction operators. Finally, I’ll describe some additional features and future plans to improve the usability of this venerable library.

Dr Simon Byrne is the lead software engineer on the CliMA project, and has been using and contributing to Julia since 2012.