Data Transfers between Processes in an SMP System: Performance Study and Application to MPI

— This paper focuses on the transfer of large data in SMP systems. Achieving good performance for intranode communication is critical for developing an efficient communication system, especially in the context of SMP clusters. We evaluate the performance of five transfer mechanisms: sharedmemory buffers, message queues, the Ptrace system call, kernel module-based copy, and a high-speed network. We evaluate each mechanism based on latency, bandwidth, its impact on application cache usage, and its suitability to support MPI twosided and one-sided messages. I. MOTIVATION AND SCOPE Designing a communication system tailored for a particular architecture requires understanding the achievable performance levels of the underlying hardware and software. Such understanding is key to a more efficient design and better performance for interprocess communication. Interprocess communication usually falls into two main categories: communication between processes within an SMP node, and communica...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Darius Buntinas, Guillaume Mercier, William Gropp
• Keywords: Communication, Communication System, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICPP 2006, SMP Clusters