Performance expectations and guidelines for MPI derived datatypes

William Gropp, Torsten Hoefler, Rajeev Thakur, Jesper Larsson Träff

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

MPI's derived datatypes provide a powerful mechanism for concisely describing arbitrary, noncontiguous layouts of user data for use in MPI communication. This paper formulates self-consistent performance guidelines for derived datatypes. Such guidelines make performance expectations for derived datatypes explicit and suggest relevant optimizations to MPI implementers. We also identify self-consistent guidelines that are too strict to enforce, because they entail NP-hard optimization problems. Enforced self-consistent guidelines assure the user that certain manual datatype optimizations cannot lead to performance improvements, which in turn contributes to performance portability between MPI implementations that behave in accordance with the guidelines. We present results of tests with several MPI implementations, which indicate that many of them violate the guidelines.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationRecent Advances in the Message Passing Interface - 18th European MPI Users' Group Meeting, EuroMPI 2011, Proceedings
Pages150-159
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event18th European Message Passing Interface Users' Group Meeting, EuroMPI 2011 - Santorini, Greece
Duration: Sep 18 2011Sep 21 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume6960 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other18th European Message Passing Interface Users' Group Meeting, EuroMPI 2011
Country/TerritoryGreece
CitySantorini
Period9/18/119/21/11

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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