Using MPI with C# and the Common Language Infrastructure

Abstract

We describe two interfaces for using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) with the C# programming language and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). The first interface provides CLI bindings that closely match the original MPI library specification. The second library presents a fully object-oriented interface to MPI and exploits modern language features of C#. The interfaces described here use the P/Invoke feature of the CLI to dispatch to a native implementation of MPI (in our case, LAM/MPI). Performance results using the Shared Source CLI demonstrate there is only a small performance overhead incurred.