Introduction



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Introduction

 

The MPI communication mechanisms introduced in the previous chapter allows one to send or receive a sequence of identical elements that are contiguous in memory. It is often desirable to send data that is not homogeneous, such as a structure, or that is not contiguous in memory, such as an array section. This allows one to amortize the fixed overhead of sending and receiving a message over the transmittal of many elements, even in these more general circumstances. MPI provides two mechanisms to achieve this.

The construction and use of derived datatypes is described in Section gif-gif. The use of Pack and Unpack functions is described in Section gif. It is often possible to achieve the same data transfer using either mechanisms. We discuss the pros and cons of each approach at the end of this chapter.



Jack Dongarra
Fri Sep 1 06:16:55 EDT 1995