Title
Performance Trade-offs in GPU Communication: A Study of Host and Device-initiated Approaches
Abstract
Network communication on GPU-based systems is a significant roadblock for many applications with small but frequent messaging requirements. One common question for application developers is, "How can they reduce the overheads and achieve the best communication performance on GPUs?" This work examines device initiated versus host initiated inter-node GPU communication using NVSHMEM. We derive basic communication model parameters for single message and batched communication before validating our model against distributed GEMM benchmarks. We use our model to estimate performance benefits for applications transitioning from CPUs to GPUS for fixed-size and scaled workloads and provide general guidelines for reducing communication overheads. Our findings show that the host-initiated approach generally outperforms the device-initiated approach for the system evaluated.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/PMBS51919.2020.00016
2020 IEEE/ACM Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems (PMBS)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Performance evaluation,High Performance Computing,GPU Communication,SHMEM
Conference
978-1-6654-2266-6
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Taylor L. Groves1267.20
Ben Brock200.34
Yuxin Chen310.81
Khaled Z. Ibrahim421521.25
Lenny Oliker500.34
Nicholas J. Wright640827.79
Samuel Williams7128298.56
Katherine A. Yelick83494407.23