International Survey

Research topic and goals

We believe international surveys are suitable for the vision of JLESC. International survey would be another type of collaboration in JLESC to obtain the insights into Exascale computing.

The International MPI survey has been being conducted as the first survey in this project. As part of a wide effort to understand the current usage of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) in the development of parallel applications and drive future additions to the MPI standard, the objective of this project is to get feedback from the largest MPI audience (past, current and potential users) to get a better understanding of their needs, and the impact of different MPI capabilities on the process of developing distributed applications. Since this questionnaire survey will be distributed worldwide, it is also expected to reveal country/region differences on the above aspects.

Existing studies on MPI uses are focused on a restricted target domain, such as the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) study conducted in 2017 that focused on MPI usage in the context of ECP applications; and/or those that are geographically constrained to a single laboratory, funding agency or at best, country.

Such studies inspired us to conduct a larger study, not focused on HPC, but targeting a wider audience and involving a larger spectrum of geographically distinct users. Since MPI has been a widely used vehicle for high-performance computing for decades, this larger-scale questionnaire survey would be beneficial not only for deciding the future direction of MPI, but also the feature differences of MPI users among countries and/or regions of the world.

This survey was conducted from February to June 2019, and at the time of this writing has gathered more than 800 answers from more than 40 countries.

Results for 2018/2019/2020

As of 02.2019 the design of the questionnaire survey is almost done. Especially we also pay attention to China which is growing rapidly in the HPC field, and we have been making great effort to have answers from China. Unfortunately, our effort is not rewarded, 15 answers from China at the time of this writing. We are now analyzing the answers and planning to submit a paper.

Results for 2020/2021

We have successfully had more than 850 participants from over 40 countries/regions. This large-scale, worldwide survey can differentiate with the other surveys so far introduced. It is revealed that many MPI users are suffered from mastering MPI, are deploring not finding appropriate learning mediums, and are not using recently introduced MPI features. We have submitted a journal paper to report the survey findings.

Results for 2021/2022

The conducted survey gathered a total of 851 answers from 42 contributors (countries/regions) around the world. We believe that this survey at this scale provides a novel view on MPI users, differentiating from and complementing for the other MPI surveys. The large number of participants, mostly from academia, allowed us to have a more clear picture about the use of MPI in an academic setting. We analyzed and summarized these results in a journal paper (Hori et al. 2021). To help other researchers interested in usage patterns, we have published the entire archive as CSV files on the project github directory.

Visits and meetings

Due to the COVID situation, all meeting in the period 2021-2022 were online meetings. They occurred regularly, mostly one to two meeting in a month.

Impact and publications

(Hori et al. 2019) (Hori et al. 2021)

1. ahori-PARCO21-survey

   BibTeX Abstract

   Hori, Atsushi, Emmanuel Jeannot, George Bosilca, Takahiro Ogura, Balazs Gerofi, Jie Yin, and Yutaka Ishikawa. 2021. “An International Survey on MPI Users.” Parallel Computing 108: 102853. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parco.2021.102853.

   @article{ahori-PARCO21-survey,
     title = {An international survey on MPI users},
     journal = {Parallel Computing},
     volume = {108},
     pages = {102853},
     year = {2021},
     issn = {0167-8191},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parco.2021.102853},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167819121000983},
     author = {Hori, Atsushi and Jeannot, Emmanuel and Bosilca, George and Ogura, Takahiro and Gerofi, Balazs and Yin, Jie and Ishikawa, Yutaka},
     keywords = {Message Passing Interface (MPI), Survey}
   }
   

2. ahori-IPSJ-2019-July

   BibTeX Abstract

   Hori, Atsushi, George Bosilca, Emmanuel Jeannot, Takahiro Ogura, and Yutaka Ishikawa. 2019. “Is Japanese HPC Another Galapagos? - Interim Report of MPI International Survey -.” In SIGHPC. Information Processing Society of Japan.

   @inproceedings{ahori-IPSJ-2019-July,
     author = {Hori, Atsushi and Bosilca, George and Jeannot, Emmanuel and Ogura, Takahiro and Ishikawa, Yutaka},
     title = {{Is Japanese HPC another Galapagos? - Interim Report of MPI International Survey -}},
     journal = {SIGHPC},
     issn = {},
     publisher = {Information Processing Society of Japan},
     year = {2019},
     month = jul,
     number = {34}
   }
   

Future plans

The MPI International Survey is a touchstone of following JLESC survey projects. If you are interested in this survey project as a project member or a subject of international survey, just join this project.

References