Supporting the Global Arrays PGAS Model Using MPI One-Sided Communication

  • Authors:
  • James Dinan;Pavan Balaji;Jeff R. Hammond;Sriram Krishnamoorthy;Vinod Tipparaju

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IPDPS '12 Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE 26th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The industry-standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) provides one-sided communication functionality and is available on virtually every parallel computing system. However, it is believed that MPI's one-sided model is not rich enough to support higher-level global address space parallel programming models. We present the first successful application of MPI one-sided communication as a runtime system for a PGAS model, Global Arrays (GA). This work has an immediate impact on users of GA applications, such as NW Chem, who often must wait several months to a year or more before GA becomes available on a new architecture. We explore challenges present in the application of MPI-2 to PGAS models and motivate new features in the upcoming MPI-3 standard. The performance of our system is evaluated on several popular high-performance computing architectures through communication benchmarking and application benchmarking using the NW Chem computational chemistry suite.