MPI: is there mpi libraries capable of message compression?

Posted by osgx on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by osgx
Published on 2012-06-01T12:08:20Z Indexed on 2012/12/16 11:06 UTC
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Sometimes MPI is used to send low-entropy data in messages. So it can be useful to try to compress messages before sending it. I know that MPI can work on very fast networks (10 Gbit/s and more), but many MPI programs are used with cheap network like 0,1G or 1Gbit/s Ethernet and with cheap (slow, low bisection) network switch. There is a very fast Snappy (wikipedia) compression algorithm, which has

Compression speed is 250 MB/s and decompression speed is 500 MB/s

so on compressible data and slow network it will give some speedup.

Is there any MPI library which can compress MPI messages (at layer of MPI; not the compression of ip packets like in PPP).

MPI messages are also structured, so there can be some special method, like compression of exponent part in array of double.

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