High-performance computing (HPC) relies on large numbers of computers to get a tough job done. Often, one computer will act as a master, parceling out data to processes that may be located anywhere in the world. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) provides a way to move the data from one place to the next.
Normally, MPI would be implemented once in each server to handle the messaging traffic. But with multicore servers using more than a few cores, it can be very expensive to use a complete MPI implementation because MPI would have to run on each core in the computer in an asymmetric multi-processing (AMP) configuration. The Multicore Communications API (MCAPI), on the other hand – a protocol designed with embedded systems in mind – is a much more efficient way to move MPI messages around within the computer.
(Read full article by Sven Brehmer, Markus Levy and Bryon Moyer at EE Times)