Summary

Implementations of the SPMD and MPMD models of concurrency have much to be gained by using templates and taking advantage of polymorphism. While the MPI does include bindings for C++ it does not take advantage of object-oriented programming techniques. This presents an opportunity and challenge to developers using the MPI standard. Inheritance and polymorphism can be used to simplify MPMD programming. Parameterized or genericity programming that is supported using the template facilities of C++ can be used to simplify SPMD programming with the MPI. Dividing a program's work between objects is a natural way to discover and exploit the parallelism within an application. Families of objects can be associated with communicators to facilitate communication in the MPI between multiple groups that have different work responsibilities. Operator overloading can be used to maintain a stream metaphor with the MPI. Using object-oriented programming techniques and parameterized programming techniques within the same MPI application is a multiparadigm approach that simplifies and in most cases shortens the code. It leads to programs that are easier to debug, test, and maintain. MPI tasks implemented by template functions tend to be more reliable across different data types than separately defined functions that have to perform type casting.