Techniques for Enabling Highly Efficient Message Passing on Many-Core Architectures

Abstract

Many-core architecture provides a massively parallel environment with dozens of cores and hundreds of hardware threads. Scientific application programmers are increasingly looking at ways to utilize such large numbers of lightweight cores for various programming models. Efficiently executing these models on massively parallel many-core environments is not easy, however and performance may be degraded in various ways. The first author's doctoral research focuses on exploiting the capabilities of many-core architectures on widely used MPI implementations. While application programmers have studied several approaches to achieve better parallelism and resource sharing, many of those approaches still face communication problems that degrade performance. In the thesis, we investigate the characteristics of MPI on such massively threaded architectures and propose two efficient strategies -- a multi-threaded MPI approach and a process-based asynchronous model -- to optimize MPI communication for modern scientific applications.