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mpiopenmpirequest-response

MPI and request/reply

Does the MPI standard implement the request-reply communication pattern?

Reading about MPI I found that there are point-to-point routines like:

  • Synchronous send
  • Blocking send / blocking receive
  • Non-blocking send /non-blocking receive
  • Buffered send
  • Combined send/receive
  • "Ready" send

Maybe a developer can implement the request-reply communication pattern using these routines, but it seems that MPI does not directly implement it.

Edit: For clarifying purposes the request-reply (request-response) is a message exchange pattern in which a requestor sends a request message to a replier system which receives and processes the request, ultimately returning a message in response. This is a simple, but powerful messaging pattern which allows two applications to have a two-way conversation with one another over a channel. This pattern is especially common in client–server architectures. It may be synchronous or asynchronous.

Solution

  • This is not available as-is.

    That being said, this is trivial to implement. The requestor can MPI_Sendrecv() and the replier can MPI_Recv() the request and then MPI_Send() the answer.