
9
Figure 2 RDMA vs. Traditional Adapter
1.2.3 What Is MPI and Why Is It Used?
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a library for message-passing used for efficient
distributed computation. Developed as a collaborative effort by a mix of research and
commercial users, MPI has expanded into a standard supported by a broad set of vendors,
implementers, and users and is designed for high performance applications on massively
parallel machines and workstation clusters. It is widely available in a number of different
vendor implementations, and open source distributions. MPI is considered the de-facto
standard for writing parallel applications.
A version of the MPI library MPICH-1.2.5 is available that is compatible with the Ammasso
1100 adapter.
1.2.4 What Is DAPL and Why Is It Used?
Direct Access Programming Library (DAPL) defines a single set of user APIs used in
Database and Storage RDMA Enabled environments. The DAPL API is defined by the DAT
(Direct Access Transport) Collaborative which is an industry group that has formed in order
to define and standardize a set of transport-independent, platform-independent Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs) that exploit RDMA (remote direct memory access). It is
being supported and utilized in NAS/SAN and Enterprise Database environments.