Title
Exploiting 162-Nanosecond End-to-End Communication Latency on Anton
Abstract
Strong scaling of scientific applications on parallel architectures is increasingly limited by communication latency. This paper describes the techniques used to mitigate latency in Anton, a massively parallel special-purpose machine that accelerates molecular dynamics (MD) simulations by orders of magnitude compared with the previous state of the art. Achieving this speedup required a combination of hardware mechanisms and software constructs to reduce network latency, sender and receiver overhead, and synchronization costs. Key elements of Anton's approach, in addition to tightly integrated communication hardware, include formulating data transfer in terms of counted remote writes, leveraging fine-grained communication, and establishing fixed, optimized communication patterns. Anton delivers software-to-software inter-node latency significantly lower than any other large-scale parallel machine, and the total critical-path communication time for an Anton MD simulation is less than 4% that of the next fastest MD platform.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/SC.2010.23
SC
Keywords
Field
DocType
network latency,next fastest md platform,total critical-path communication time,integrated communication hardware,anton md simulation,optimized communication pattern,exploiting 162-nanosecond end-to-end communication,large-scale parallel machine,fine-grained communication,communication latency,software-to-software inter-node latency,force,bandwidth,molecular biophysics,molecular dynamics simulation,radiation detectors,synchronization,critical path,hardware,electronic data interchange,data transfer,computational modeling,molecular dynamic
Synchronization,Data transmission,Massively parallel,Computer science,End-to-end principle,Latency (engineering),Parallel computing,Software,Bandwidth (signal processing),Distributed computing,Speedup
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4244-7558-2
9
0.75
References 
Authors
22
14
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ron O. Dror143940.56
J. P. Grossman237633.12
Kenneth Mackenzie3987.69
Brian Towles42564195.45
Edmond Chow5635.26
John K. Salmon641046.45
Cliff Young741146.31
Joseph A. Bank81078.53
Brannon Batson927021.72
Martin M. Deneroff1021617.30
Jeffrey S. Kuskin1121016.84
Richard H. Larson1220815.83
Mark A. Moraes1324918.66
David E. Shaw1490.75