Spread vs MPI vs zeromq?

api networking messaging distributed cluster-computing
Ben Collins picture Ben Collins · Aug 30, 2008 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

In one of the answers to Broadcast like UDP with the Reliability of TCP, a user mentions the Spread messaging API. I've also run across one called ØMQ. I also have some familiarity with MPI.

So, my main question is: why would I choose one over the other? More specifically, why would I choose to use Spread or ØMQ when there are mature implementations of MPI to be had?

Answer

Todd Gamblin picture Todd Gamblin · Sep 15, 2008

MPI was deisgned tightly-coupled compute clusters with fast, reliable networks. Spread and ØMQ are designed for large distributed systems. If you're designing a parallel scientific application, go with MPI, but if you are designing a persistent distributed system that needs to be resilient to faults and network instability, use one of the others.

MPI has very limited facilities for fault tolerance; the default error handling behavior in most implementations is a system-wide fail. Also, the semantics of MPI require that all messages sent eventually be consumed. This makes a lot of sense for simulations on a cluster, but not for a distributed application.

Related questions

IP Camera, how to detect it on the network?

I am creating a program to talk to a IP Camera, of this model: CVUL-I125 This has a simple web interface and I've successfully talked to it in order to control it, and grab video and snapshots from it. However, …

Read More
No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource—when trying to get data from a REST API

I'm trying to fetch some data from the REST API of HP Alm. It works pretty well with a small curl script - I get my data. Now doing that with JavaScript, fetch and ES6 (more or less) seems to …

Read More
How do I make calls to a REST API using C#?

This is the code I have so far: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web; using System.Net; using System.IO; namespace ConsoleProgram { public class Class1 { …

Read More