November 1, 2006
Conference Paper

Design and Implementation of a One-Sided Communication Interface for the IBM eServer Blue Gene

Abstract

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a one-sided communication interface for the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer. This interface facilitates ARMCI and the Global Arrays toolkit and can be used by other one-sided communication libraries. New protocols, interrupt driven communication, and compute node kernel enhancements were required to enable these libraries. Three possible methods for enabling ARMCI on the Blue Gene/L software stack are discussed. A detailed look into the development process shows how the implementation of the one-sided communication interface was completed. This was accomplished on a compressed time scale with the collaboration of various organizations within IBM and open source communities. In addition to enabling the one-sided libraries, bandwidth enhancements were made for communication along a diagonal on the Blue Gene/L torus network. The maximum bandwidth improved by a factor of three. This work will enable a variety of one-sided applications to run on Blue Gene/L.

Revised: September 5, 2007 | Published: November 1, 2006

Citation

Blocksome M., C. Archer, T. Inglett, P. McCarthy, M. Mundy, J. Ratterman, and A. Sidelnik, et al. 2006. Design and Implementation of a One-Sided Communication Interface for the IBM eServer Blue Gene. In Supercomputing 2006, ACM/IEEE Conference, 54. Los Alamitos, California:IEEE Computer Society. PNNL-SA-51284. doi:10.1109/SC.2006.22