Revealing the performance of MPI RMA implementations

William D. Gropp, Rajeev Thakur

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

Abstract

The MPI remote-memory access (RMA) operations provide a different programming model from the regular MPI-1 point-to-point operations. This model is particularly appropriate for cases where there are multiple communication events for each synchronization and where the target memory locations are known by the source processes. In this paper, we describe a benchmark designed to illustrate the performance of RMA with multiple RMA operations for each synchronization, as compared with point-to-point communication. We measured the performance of this benchmark on several platforms (SGI Altix, Sun Fire, IBM SMP, Linux cluster) and MPI implementations (SGI, Sun, IBM, MPICH2, Open MPI). We also investigated the effectiveness of the various optimization options specified by the MPI standard. Our results show that MPI RMA can provide substantially higher performance than point-topoint communication on some platforms, such as SGI Altix and Sun Fire. The results also show that many opportunities still exist for performance improvements in the implementation of MPI RMA.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationRecent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface - 14th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer
Pages272-280
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9783540754152
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Externally publishedYes
Event14th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface - Paris, France
Duration: Sep 30 2007Oct 3 2007

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4757 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other14th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityParis
Period9/30/0710/3/07

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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