Minimizing synchronization overhead in the implementation of MPI one-sided communication

Rajeev Thakur, William D. Gropp, Brian Toonen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

The one-sided communication operations in MPI are intended to provide the convenience of directly accessing remote memory and the potential for higher performance than regular point-to-point communication. Our performance measurements with three MPI implementations (IBM MPI, Sun MPI, and LAM) indicate, however, that one-sided communication can perform much worse than point-to-point communication if the associated synchronization calls are not implemented efficiently. In this paper, we describe our efforts to minimize the overhead of synchronization in our implementation of one-sided communication in MPICH-2. We describe our optimizations for all three synchronization mechanisms defined in MPI: fence, post-start-complete-wait, and lock-unlock. Our performance results demonstrate that, for short messages, MPICH-2 performs six times faster than LAM for fence synchronization and 50% faster for post-start-complete-wait synchronization, and it performs more than twice as fast as Sun MPI for all three synchronization methods.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
EditorsDieter Kranzlmuller, Peter Kacsuk, Jack Dongarra
PublisherSpringer
Pages57-67
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)3540231633
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume3241
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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