A collective communication library for parallel computers includes frequently used operations such as broadcast, reduce, scatter, gather, concatenate, synchronize, and shift. Such a library provides users with a convenient programming interface, efficient communication operations, and the advantage of portability. A library of this nature, the Collective Communication Library (CCL), intended for the line of scalable parallel amputer products by IBM, has been designed. CCL is pact of the

more »

... application programming interface of the recently announced IBM 9076 Scalable POWERparallel System 1 (SP1). In this paper, we examine several issues related to the functionality, correctness, and performance of a portable collective communication library while focusing on three novel aspects in the design and implementation of CCL: 1) the introduction of process groups, 2) the definition of semantics that ensures correctness, and 3) the design of new and tunable algorithms based on a realistic point-to-point communication model.