Frequently Asked Questions:
Performance

Many programmers concerned with performance tend to avoid garbage-collected languages that execute in a virtual machine, because those language features have traditionally had a high cost to performance, particularly in the small, numeric kernels that are often used when benchmarking for scientific applications. However, recent advances in virtual machines and just-in-time compilation have closed the gap significantly, and the two-orders-of-magnitude slowdowns reported in early scientific programs using Java are long gone. In our MPI.NET micro-benchmarks that intentionally measure the overhead of the virtual machine and MPI..NET directly against native C code, we saw 7-12% slowdowns in MPI.NET in the absolute worst case (NetPIPE results using shared memory).

MPI.NET automatically serializes objects when they are transmitted from one process to another, so that users need not worry about their (de-)serialization. The (de-)serialization process has a non-trivial cost, since it involves memory allocation, copying data into a platform-neutral form, and often some virtual method calls and even object reflection. This cost is necessary for objects on the heap, but it becomes a huge performance problem when applied to simple datatypes like integers, floating-point values, or complex numbers. Thus, MPI.NET uses aggressive optimization techniques so that it only serializes objects on the heap. Primitive types (like integers and floating-point values) and .NET's value types (including structures, like a complex number) are transmitted directly through MPI without serialization, providing performance near that of native C code.