Message passing and shared address space parallelism on an SMP cluster

  • Authors:

  • Hongzhang Shan;Jaswinder P. Singh;Leonid Oliker;Rupak Biswas

  • Affiliations:

  • NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA;NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division, NASA Ames Research Center, Mail Stop T27A-1, Moffett Field, CA

  • Venue:
  • Parallel Computing
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Currently, message passing (MP) and shared address space (SAS) are the two leading parallel programming paradigms. MP has been standardized with MPI, and is the more common and mature approach; however, code development can be extremely difficult, especially for irregularly structured computations. SAS offers substantial ease of programming, but may suffer from performance limitations due to poor spatial locality and high protocol overhead. In this paper, we compare the performance of and the programming effort required for six applications under both programming models on a 32-processor PC-SMP cluster, a platform that is becoming increasingly attractive for high-end scientific computing. Our application suite consists of codes that typically do not exhibit scalable performance under shared-memory programming due to their high communication-to-computation ratios and/or complex commumcation patterns. Results indicate that SAS can achieve about half the parallel efficiency of MPI for most of our applications, while being competitive for the others. A hybrid MPI + SAS strategy shows only a small performance advantage over pure MPI in some cases. Finally, improved implementations of two MPI collective operations on PC-SMP clusters are presented.