MeDLey: from point-to-point to collective communications

Modern technologies, including the rapid increase in the speed and availability of supercomputer networks, provide the infrastructure necessary to develop distributed applications and make high-performance global computing possible. The performance potential offered is enormous, but generally it is hard and tedious to obtain, due to the complexity of developing applications in such a distributed environment. To cure this problem, we introduce MeDLey (Message Definition Language), which is a communications specification language for parallel applications. In this paper, we overview the basics of MeDLey's syntax and semantics, before discussing the extension part of this language for collective communications.