Contemplating a Lightweight Communication Interface for Asynchronous Many-Task Systems

Asynchronous Many-Task Systems (AMTs) exhibit different communication patterns from traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications, characterized by asynchrony, concurrency, and multithreading. Existing communication libraries usually do not support AMTs' communication requirements in the most direct and efficient ways. The Lightweight Communication Interface (LCI) is an experimental communication library aiming to push for efficient communication support for AMTs. This paper presents the design for a new LCI C++ interface and its rationale. With a new C++ objectized flexible functions idiom, the new interface aims for the following features: (a) a concise but expressive interface for all common point-to-point communication primitives and completion mechanisms, (b) a fine-grained resource mapping scheme for library interoperation, multithreaded performance isolation, and flexibility (c) a set of optional parameters and overridable classes for users to incrementally fine-tune the runtime behavior.