Accelerating communication-intensive parallel workloads using commodity optical switches and a software-configurable control stack

Authors:
Diego Lugones;Konstantinos Christodoulopoulos;Kostas Katrinis;Marco Ruffini;Donal O'Mahony;Martin Collier
Affiliations:
The Rince Institute, Dublin City University, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;IBM Research, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;The Rince Institute, Dublin City University, Ireland
Venue:
Euro-Par'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel Processing
Year:
2013

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Abstract

In response to the need for faster and fatter networks for large-scale HPC cluster systems, hybrid optical/electrical networks have been proposed as an affordable and high-capacity solution. Still, there is no prior work evaluating the performance of HPC workloads over such types of networks. To fill this gap, this work presents a hybrid network architecture comprising commodity-only equipment, shows its price competitiveness against fat-tree alternatives and presents a prototype implementation. We evaluated several HPC workloads over our prototype, showing that our hybrid optical/electrical network manages to significantly accelerate tested workloads, without incurring any extra cost compared to an all-electronic fat-tree network.