Network-Friendly One-Sided Communication through Multinode Cooperation on Petascale Cray XT5 Systems

—One-sided communication is important to enable asynchronous communication and data movement for Global Address Space (GAS) programming models. Such communication is typically realized through direct messages between initiator and target processes. For petascale systems with 10,000s of nodes and 100,000s of cores, these direct messages require dedicated communication buffers and/or channels, which can lead to significant scalability challenges for GAS programming models. In this paper, we describe a network-friendly communication model, multinode cooperation, to enable indirect one-sided communication. Compute nodes work together to handle one-side requests through (1) request forwarding in which one node can intercept a request and forward it to a target node, and (2) request aggregation in which one node can aggregate many requests to a target node. We have implemented multinode cooperation for a popular GAS runtime library, Aggregate Remote Memory Copy Interface (ARMCI). Our expe...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Xinyu Que, Weikuan Yu, Vinod Tipparaju, Jeffrey S. Vetter, Bin Wang
• Keywords: CCGRID 2011, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Global Address Space, Network Contention, Target Node