MPI is a communication protocol for programming parallel computers. MPI's goals are high performance, scalability, and portability. The MPI interface is meant to provide essential virtual topology, synchronization, and communication functionality between a set of processes (that have been mapped to nodes/servers/computer instances).MPI has been widely used in High-Performance Computing. In contrast, such efficient communication support is lacking in the field of Big Data Computing, where communication is realized by time-consuming techniques such as HTTP/RPC. This paper takes a step in bridging these two fields by extending MPI to support Hadoop-like Big Data Computing jobs, where processing and communication of a large number of key-value pair instances are needed through distributed computation models such as MapReduce, Iteration, and Streaming. We abstract the characteristics of key-value communication patterns into a bipartite communication model, which reveals four distinctions from MPI: Dichotomic, Dynamic, Data-centric, and Diversified features. Utilizing this model, we propose the specification of a minimalistic extension to MPI. An open source communication library, DataMPI, is developed to implement this specification. Performance experiments show that DataMPI has significant advantages in performance and flexibility while maintaining high productivity, scalability, and fault tolerance of Hadoop.
