mpi_shim

MPI support wrapper for optional dependency on mpi4py

Introduction

This module is designed to be copied into projects that optionally depend on MPI, to unify handling of MPI and non-MPI cases.

To load MPI, import this module. The module can always be imported, regardless of whether mpi4py is installed. The availability of the mpi4py library can then be queried at runtime using mpi_shim.has_mpi().

Some rudimentary wrappers (get_size(), get_rank(), get_comm_world()) are provided; all the rest should be done directly via mpi4py, and only if has_mpi() returns True. This way, the same code can run both with and without MPI.

Also provided is gather_varlength_array(), a buffer-based fast gather for rank-1 NumPy arrays of varying lengths (like gatherv, but determining the sizes automatically).

Example

Based on http://mpi4py.scipy.org/docs/usrman/tutorial.html:

import mpi_shim

MPI    = mpi_shim.get_mpi()         # either a reference to mpi4py.MPI, or None if n/a
nprocs = mpi_shim.get_size()        # actual value from mpi4py, or 1    if n/a
my_id  = mpi_shim.get_rank()        # actual value from mpi4py, or 0    if n/a
comm   = mpi_shim.get_comm_world()  # actual value from mpi4py, or None if n/a

# The rest works as usual:

data = (my_id+1)**2  # <insert meaningful calculation here>
if MPI is not None:
   data = comm.gather(data, root=0)

if my_id == 0:
   for i in range(nprocs):
       assert data[i] == (i+1)**2
else:
   assert data is None

License

BSD. Copyright 2012-2017 Juha Jeronen and University of Jyväskylä.