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10th International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS '96)
Software techniques for improving MPP bulk-transfer performance
Honolulu, HI
April 15-April 19
ISBN: 0-8186-7255-2
E.A. Brewer, California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA
P. Gauthier, California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA
A. Fox, California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA
A. Schuett, California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA
Brewer & Kuszmaul (1994) demonstrated how barriers and traffic interleaving can alleviate the problem of bulk-transfer performance degradation on the Thinking Machines CM-5 massively parallel processor (MPP) by exploiting the observation that one-on-one communication avoids network congestion. We apply and extend these techniques on the Intel Paragon and MIT Alewife machines. Because these machines lack the CM-5's fast hardware support for barriers, we introduce a token-passing scheme that avoids barriers while maintaining one-on-one communication. We also introduce a new algorithm-distributed dynamic scheduling-that brings Brewer & Kuszmaul's observations to bear on irregular traffic patterns by massaging traffic into a sequence of near-permutations at runtime, without requiring any preprocessing or global state. The measured performance of our algorithm exceeds that of traffic interleaving (the most effective technique proposed by Brewer & Kuszmaul) on all three platforms, and is comparable to the performance of static scheduling, which requires preprocessing and global state.
Index Terms:
parallel machines; processor scheduling; telecommunication traffic; performance evaluation; software performance evaluation; software techniques; bulk-transfer performance; barriers; traffic interleaving; Thinking Machines CM-5; massively parallel processor; one-on-one communication; network congestion; Intel Paragon; MIT Alewife machine; token-passing scheme; distributed dynamic scheduling; irregular traffic patterns; traffic massaging; near-permutations; preprocessing; global state; algorithm performance; static scheduling
Citation:
E.A. Brewer, P. Gauthier, A. Fox, A. Schuett, "Software techniques for improving MPP bulk-transfer performance," ipps, pp.406, 10th International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS '96), 1996
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