Title
MPI-ACC: Accelerator-Aware MPI for Scientific Applications
Abstract
Data movement in high-performance computing systems accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs) remains a challenging problem. Data communication in popular parallel programming models, such as the Message Passing Interface (MPI), is currently limited to the data stored in the CPU memory space. Auxiliary memory systems, such as GPU memory, are not integrated into such data movement standards, thus providing applications with no direct mechanism to perform end-toend data movement. We introduce MPI-ACC, an integrated and extensible framework that allows end-to-end data movement in accelerator-based systems. MPI-ACC provides productivity and performance benefits by integrating support for auxiliary memory spaces into MPI. MPI-ACC supports data transfer among CUDA, OpenCL and CPU memory spaces and is extensible to other offload models as well. MPI-ACC’s runtime system enables several key optimizations, including pipelining of data transfers, scalable memory management techniques, and balancing of communication based on accelerator and node architecture. MPIACC is designed to work concurrently with other GPU workloads with minimum contention. We describe how MPI-ACC can be used to design new communication-computation patterns in scientific applications from domains such as epidemiology simulation and seismology modeling, and we discuss the lessons learned. We present experimental results on a state-of-the-art cluster with hundreds of GPUs; and we compare the performance and productivity of MPI-ACC with MVAPICH, a popular CUDA-aware MPI solution. MPI-ACC encourages programmers to explore novel application-specific optimizations for improved overall cluster utilization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/TPDS.2015.2446479
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst.
Keywords
Field
DocType
concurrent programming,distributed architectures,heterogeneous (hybrid) systems,parallel systems
Central processing unit,Computer architecture,Computer science,CUDA,Parallel computing,Message Passing Interface,Memory management,Scalability,Runtime system,Distributed computing,CUDA Pinned memory,Auxiliary memory
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
PP
99
1045-9219
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.50
13
Authors
12
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ashwin M. Aji191.55
Lokendra S. Panwar270.50
Feng Ji370.50
Karthik Murthy4313.50
Milind Chabbi59311.08
Pavan Balaji61475111.48
Keith R. Bisset734628.60
James Dinan828521.84
Wu-chun Feng92812232.50
John M. Mellor-Crummey1081380.47
Xiaosong Ma11111768.36
Rajeev Thakur123773251.09