Efficient wire formats for high performance computing

High performance computing is being increasingly utilized in non-traditional circumstances where it must interoperate with other applications. For example, online visualization is being used to monitor the progress of applications, and real-world sensors are used as inputs to simulations. Whenever these situations arise, there is a question of what communications infrastructure should be used to link the different components. Traditional HPC-style communications systems such as MPI offer relatively high performance, but are poorly suited for developing these less tightly-coupled cooperating applications. Object-based systems and meta-data formats like XML offer substantial plug-and-play flexibility, but with substantially lower performance. We observe that the flexibility and baseline performance of all these systems is strongly determined by their 'wire format', or how they represent data for transmission in a heterogeneous environment. We examine the performance implications of different wire formats and present an alternative with significant advantages in terms of both performance and flexibility.