Krishnan, Manoj Kumar

DOE OSTI2011

Implementing High Performance Remote Method Invocation in CCA

We report our effort in engineering a high performance remote method invocation (RMI) mechanism for the Common Component Architecture (CCA). This mechanism provides a highly efficient and easy-to-use mechanism for distributed computing in CCA, enabling CCA applications to effectively leverage parallel systems to accelerate computations. This work is built on the previous work of Babel RMI. Babel is a high performance language interoperability tool that is used in CCA for scientific application writers to share, reuse, and compose applications from software components written in different programming languages. Babel provides a transparent and flexible RMI framework for distributed computing. However, the existing Babel RMI implementation is built on top of TCP and does not provide the level of performance required to distribute fine-grained tasks. We observed that the main reason the TCP based RMI does not perform well is because it does not utilize the high performance interconnect hardware on a cluster efficiently. We have implemented a high performance RMI protocol, HPCRMI. HPCRMI achieves low latency by building on top of a low-level portable communication library, Aggregated Remote Message Copy Interface (ARMCI), and minimizing communication for each RMI call. Our design allows a RMI operation to be completed by only two RDMA operations. We also aggressively optimize our system to reduce copying. In this paper, we discuss the design and our experimental evaluation of this protocol. Our experimental results show that our protocol can improve RMI performance by an order of magnitude.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2011

Dynamic Time-Variant Connection Management for PGAS Models on InfiniBand

InfiniBand (IB) has established itself as a promising network infrastructure for high-end cluster computing systems as evidenced by its usage in the Top500 supercomputers today. While the IB standard describes multiple communication models (including reliable-connection (RC), and unreliable datagram (UD)), most of its promising features such as remote direct memory access (RDMA), hardware atomics and network fault tolerance are only available for the RC model which requires connections between communicating process pairs. In the past, several researchers have proposed on-demand connection management techniques that establish connections when there is a need to communicate, and not before. While such techniques work well for algorithms and applications that only communicate with a small set of processes in their life-time, there exists a broad set of applications that do not follow this trend. For example, applications that perform dynamic load balancing and adaptive work stealing have a small set of communicating neighbors at any given time, but over time the total number of neighbors can be very high; in some cases, equal to the entire system size. In this paper, we present a dynamic time-variant connection management approach that establishes connections on-demand like previous approaches, but further intelligently tears down some of the unused connections as well. While connection tear-down itself is relevant for any programming model, different models have different complexities. In this paper, we study the Global Arrays (GA) PGAS model for two reasons: (1) the simple one-sided communication primitives provided by GA and other PGAS models ensure that connection requests are always initiated by the origin process without explicit synchronization with the target process---this makes connection tear-down simpler to handle; and (2) GA supports several applications that demonstrate this behavior making it an obvious first target for the proposed enhancements. We evaluate our proposed approach using several micro-benchmarks as well as the NWChem computational chemistry application on more than 6000 processes, and show that our approach can significantly reduce the memory requirements of the communication library while maintaining its performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first design, implementation and evaluation of connection tear-down protocols over InfiniBand.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗