Introducing gravel: An MPI companion library

A non-trivial challenge in high performance, cluster computing is the communication overhead introduced by the cluster interconnect. A common strategy for addressing this challenge is the use of communication-computation overlapping. In this paper, we introduce Gravel, a portable communication library designed to inter-operate with MPI for improving communication-computation overlapping. Selected MPI calls are semi-automatically replaced by Gravel calls only in key locations in an application where performance is critical. Gravel separates the data transfers from the handshake messages, enabling application developers to utilize Remote Data Memory Access (RDMA) directly, whether the data exchange scheme of their application is pure one-sided, or a more traditional two-sided. The Gravel API is much simpler than existing low level libraries and details (i.e., pointers) are hidden from the application layer so Gravel is usable in FORTRAN applications. This paper presents an overview of G...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Anthony Danalis, Aaron Brown, Lori L. Pollock, D. Martin Swany
• Keywords: Communication-computation Overlapping, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Gravel, Gravel Calls, IPPS 2008