MPICH-GQ: quality-of-service for message passing programs

  • Authors:
  • Alain J. Roy;Ian Foster;William Gropp;Brian Toonen;Nicholas Karonis;Volker Sander

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL;Department of Computer Science, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL and Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National, Laboratory, Argonne, IL;Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National, Laboratory, Argonne, IL;Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National, Laboratory, Argonne, IL;High-Performance Computing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL;Central Institute for Applied Mathematics, Forschungszentrum, Jülich GmbH, 52425 Jülich, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2000 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Parallel programmers typically assume that all resources required for a program's execution are dedicated to that purpose. However, in local and wide area networks, contention for shared networks, CPUs, and I/O systems can result in significant variations in availability, with consequent adverse effects on overall performance. We describe a new message-passingarchitecture, MPICH-GQ, that uses quality of service (QoS) mechanisms to manage contention and hence improve performance of message passing interface (MPI) applications. MPICH-GQ combines new QoS specification, traffic shaping, QoS reservation, and QoS implementation techniques to deliver QoS capabilities to the high-bandwidth bursty flows, complex structures, and reliable protocols used in high-performance applications-characteristics very different from the low-bandwidth, constant bit-rate media flows and unreliable protocols for which QoS mechanisms were designed. Results obtained on a differentiated services testbed demonstrate our ability to maintain application performance in the face of heavy network contention.