[mpich2-dev] Porting MPI to a new n-way multi-core platform...

[顏士敦]

Dear all, 

I’m a completely newbie to MPI and I’m assigned a job with tight schedule to port MPI to a multi-core system currently under developing. 
It would be very appreciated if anyone could show me where to start with. 

We’re currently developing a many-core / multi-core system, consisting of more than 10 ARM processors. 
The system is constructed by connecting several 4-way SMP board with Gb-Ethernet. 
The OS on cores will be linux together with certain RTOS, such as uC/OS-II. 
I’m going to replace MPI’s underlying communication mechanism from TCP/IP socket to somehow our hardware specific ways. 

I’ve searched some data and it seems the most popular free MPI implementations would be MPICH2 and OpenMPI. 
Some said MPICH2 is more portable than OpenMPI, so I just try hacking its source. 
However tremendous sources overwhelm my brain pretty soon. 

Could someone please tell me whether I’m in right direction? 
So far I’m suffering from below questions: 
* Is there a porting guide available? 
* Is there any abstraction layer for the socket communication mechanism? Which files should I look into? 
* To port MPI on RTOS, which APIs should OS provide? 
Glancing at the source I find MALLOC/FREE and sprintf(), yet I think there must be much more. 
Is there any list about this? 

Thank you for reading. Any comments will be very appreciated. 
 
 
Sincerely, 
Shihtun Yen
shihtun AT gmail.com
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Cheng Kung University, TWN