May 20, 2013
Conference Paper

Building Scalable PGAS Communication Subsystem on Blue Gene/Q

Abstract

This paper presents a design of scalable Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) communication subsystems on recently proposed Blue Gene/Q architecture. The proposed design provides an in-depth modeling of communication infrastructure using Parallel Active Messaging Interface (PAMI). The communication infrastructure is used to design time-space efficient communication protocols for frequently used data-types (contiguous, uniformly non-contiguous) using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) get/put primitives. The proposed design accelerates load balance counters by using asynchronous threads, which are required due to the missing network hardware support for Atomic Memory Operations (AMOs). Under the proposed design, the synchronization traffic is reduced by tracking conflicting memory accesses in distributed space with slightly increment in space complexity. An evaluation with simple communication benchmarks show a adjacent node get latency of 2.89$\mu$s and peak bandwidth of 1775 MB/s resulting in $\approx$ 99\% communication efficiency.The evaluation shows a reduction in the execution time by up to 30\% for NWChem self consistent field calculation on 4096 processes using the proposed asynchronous thread based design.

Revised: February 19, 2016 | Published: May 20, 2013

Citation

Vishnu A., D.J. Kerbyson, K.J. Barker, and H. van Dam. 2013. Building Scalable PGAS Communication Subsystem on Blue Gene/Q. In IEEE 27th Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshop & PhD Forum (IPDPSW 2013), May 20-24, 2013, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 825-833. Piscataway, New Jersey:IEEE. PNNL-SA-93018. doi:10.1109/IPDPSW.2013.262