The industry-standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) provides one-sided communication functionality and is available on virtually every parallel computing system. However, it is believed that MPI’s one-sided model is not rich enough to support higher-level global address space parallel programming models. We present the first successful application of MPI one-sided communication as a runtime system for a PGAS model, Global Arrays (GA). This work has an immediate impact on users of GA applications, such as NWChem, who often must wait several months to a year or more before GA becomes available on a new architecture. We explore challenges present in the application of MPI-2 to PGAS models and motivate new features in the upcoming MPI-3 standard. The performance of our system is evaluated on several popular high-performance computing architectures through communication benchmarking and application benchmarking using the NWChem computational chemistry suite.
Revised: February 19, 2016 |
Published: May 21, 2012
Citation
Dinan J., P. Balaji, J.R. Hammond, S. Krishnamoorthy, and V. Tipparaju. 2012.Supporting the Global Arrays PGAS Model Using MPI One-Sided Communication. In IEEE 26th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2012), May 21-25, 2012, Shanghai, 739-750. Piscataway, New Jersey:IEEE.PNNL-SA-85960.doi:10.1109/IPDPS.2012.72