Implications of application usage characteristics for collective communication offload

  • Authors:

  • Ron Brightwell;Sue P. Goudy;Arun Rodrigues;Keith D. Underwood

  • Affiliations:

  • Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 5800, MS-1110 Albuquerque, NM 87185-1110, USA.;Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 5800, MS-1110 Albuquerque, NM 87185-1110, USA.;Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 5800, MS-1110 Albuquerque, NM 87185-1110, USA.;Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 5800, MS-1110 Albuquerque, NM 87185-1110, USA

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The global, synchronous nature of some collective operations implies that they will become the bottleneck when scaling to hundreds of thousands of nodes. One approach improves collective performance using a programmable network interface to directly implement collectives. While these implementations improve micro-benchmark performance, accelerating applications will require deeper understanding of application behaviour. We describe several characteristics of applications that impact collective communication performance. We analyse network resource usage data to guide the design of collective offload engines and their associated programming interfaces. In particular, we provide an analysis of the potential benefit of non-blocking collective communication operations for MPI.