📬 BriefKAsten

This library provides a MPI message queue with transparent buffering, message indirection and effortless asynchronous lazy messaging.

This has been developed as part of our work on distributed triangle counting.

If you use this code in the context of an academic publication, we kindly ask you to cite the corresponding paper:

@inproceedings{sanders2023
  author       = {Peter Sanders and
                  Tim Niklas Uhl},
  title        = {Engineering a Distributed-Memory Triangle Counting Algorithm},
  booktitle    = {{IEEE} International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium,
                  {IPDPS} 2023, St. Petersburg, FL, USA, May 15-19, 2023},
  pages        = {702--712},
  publisher    = {{IEEE}},
  year         = {2023},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS54959.2023.00076},
  doi          = {10.1109/IPDPS54959.2023.00076},
}

You can also find a freely accessible postprint in the arXiv.

Usage

This library is header only. You need a C++23 ready compiler, since it relies heavily on C++ concepts and the ranges library.

To use it in your project, include this repo using FetchContent, as git submodule or your preferred way of CMake dependency management and (if needed) include it as subdirectory. You can link against it using

# if using git submodules
add_subdirectory(path/to/submodule)

# if using FetchContent
FetchContent_Declare(BriefKAsten
  GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/niklas-uhl/BriefKAsten
  GIT_TAG v0.2.0
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(BriefKAsten)

# link against the target
target_link_libraries(<your-target> PRIVATE BriefKAsten::BriefKAsten)

Check out the tests directory to see how to use this library.

Caveats

This library relies heavily on C++ concepts and the ranges library. Especially the latter is not fully supported by all compilers claiming to support C++20. If you use a splitter function using std::ranges::split_view, you should be aware that some older compilers (< GCC 12 || < Clang 16) do not return a std::ranges::sized_range when splitting a sized ranged (such as message buffers), which is required for all messages used with the message queue. This behavior has been described in P2210R2 and fixed in the current version of the standard. std::ranges::split_view now returns subranges which have the same iterator type as the underlying view, while the old behavior has been renamed to std::ranges::lazy_split_view. If you use a compiler without this defect fixed, you have to manually convert the returned lazy split view to a sized split view. See the implementation of message_queue::SentinelSplitter for an example.