Using simulation to examine the effect of MPI message matching costs on application performance

•The execution time of current HPC workloads is unlikely to be significantly affected by MPI message matching performance.•Advanced message matching techniques are unlikely to significantly improve application performance unless match queue depths grow substantially.•Multithreaded MPI has the potent...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Parallel computing 2019-05, Vol.84, p.63-74
Main Authors: Levy, Scott, Ferreira, Kurt B., Schonbein, Whit, Grant, Ryan E., Dosanjh, Matthew G.F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Message passing interface
Message processing
Multithreading
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Summary:•The execution time of current HPC workloads is unlikely to be significantly affected by MPI message matching performance.•Advanced message matching techniques are unlikely to significantly improve application performance unless match queue depths grow substantially.•Multithreaded MPI has the potential to increase the performance impact of MPI message matching, but current forecasts suggest that the impact is likely to remain modest. Attaining high performance with MPI applications requires efficient message matching to minimize message processing overheads and the latency these overheads introduce into application communication. In this paper, we use a validated simulation-based approach to examine the relationship between MPI message matching performance and application time-to-solution. Specifically, we examine how the performance of several important HPC workloads is affected by the time required for matching. Our analysis yields several important contributions: (i) the performance of current workloads is unlikely to be significantly affected by MPI matching unless match queue operations get much slower or match queues get much longer; (ii) match queue designs that provide sublinear performance as a function of queue length are unlikely to yield much benefit unless match queue lengths increase dramatically; and (iii) we provide guidance on how long the mean time per match attempt may be without significantly affecting application performance. The results and analysis in this paper provide valuable guidance on the design and development of MPI message match queues.
ISSN:0167-8191
1872-7336
DOI:10.1016/j.parco.2019.02.008