Python Parallel Programming Cookbook

How to optimize communication

An interesting feature that is provided by MPI concerns the virtual topologies. As already noted, all the communication functions (point-to-point or collective) refer to a group of processes. We have always used the MPI_COMM_WORLD group that includes all processes. It assigns a rank 0 to n-1 for each process that belongs to a communicator of the size n. However, MPI allows us to assign a virtual topology to a communicator. It defines a particular assignment of labels to the different processes. A mechanism of this type permits you to increase the execution performance. In fact, if you build a virtual topology, then every node will communicate only with its virtual neighbor, optimizing the performance.

For example, ...