This year’s EuroPVM/MPI was held in Helsinki (not quite, but close to it). I stayed in Hanasaari, a beautiful island with a small hotel and conference center on it. It’s a bit remote but nicely surrounded by nature.
The conference was nice, I learned about formal verification of MPI programs in the first day’s tutorial. This technique seems really nice for non-deterministic MPI programs (how many are there?) but there are certainly some open problems (similar to the state explosion of thread-checkers). The remainder of the conference was very nice and it feels good to meet the usual MPI suspects again. Some highlights were in my opinion:
- Edgar’s “VolpexMPI: an MPI Library for Execution of Parallel Applications on Volatile Nodes” (indeterminism is an interesting discussion in this context)
- Rusty’s keynote on “Using MPI to Implement Scalable Libraries” (which I suspect could use collectives)
- Argonne’s “Processing MPI Datatypes Outside MPI” (could be very very useful for LibNBC)
- and Steven’s invited talk on “Formal Verification for Scientific Computing: Trends and Progress” (an excellent overview for our comunity)
The whole crowd:
Unfortunately, I had to leave before the MPI Forum information session to catch my flight.
Videos of many talks are available at Videos. All-in-all, it was worth to attend. Next year’s EuroMPI (yes, the conference was finally renamed after the second year in a row without a PVM paper) will be in Stuttgart. So stay tuned and submit papers!