Host Software Stack Optimizations to Maximize Aggregate Fabric Throughput

• Main Authors: Ravi, Vignesh T., Erwin, James, Sivakumar, Pradeep, Tang, C. Q., Jianxin Xiong, Ganapathi, Ravindra Babu, Debbage, Mark
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Engines; Fabrics; Multiaccess communication; Optimization; Protocols; Software; Throughput
• ISSN: 2332-5569
• DOI: 10.1109/HOTI.2017.20

Scientific HPC applications along with the emerging class of Big Data and Machine Learning workloads are rapidly driving the fabric scale both on premises and in the cloud. Achieving high aggregate fabric throughput is paramount to the overall performance of the application. However, achieving high fabric throughput at scale can be challenging - that is, the application communication pattern will need to map well on to the target fabric architecture, and the multi-layered host software stack in the middle will need to orchestrate that mapping optimally to unleash the full performance.In this paper, we investigate low-level optimizations to the host software stack with the goal of improving the aggregate fabric throughput, and hence, application performance. We develop and present a number of optimization and tuning techniques that are key driving factors to the fabric performance at scale - such as, Fine-grained interleaving, improved pipelining, and careful resource utilization and management. We believe that these low-level optimizations can be commonly leveraged by several programming models and their runtime implementations making these optimizations broadly applicable. Using a set of well-known MPI-based scientific applications, we demonstrate that these optimizations can significantly improve the overall fabric throughput and the application performance. Interestingly, we also observe that some of these optimizations are inter-related and can additively contribute to the overall performance.