Notified Access: Extending Remote Memory Access Programming Models for Producer-Consumer Synchronization
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Date
2015
Publication Type
Conference Paper
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yes
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Abstract
Remote Memory Access (RMA) programming enables direct access to low-level hardware features to achieve high performance for distributed-memory programs. However, the design of RMA programming schemes focuses on the memory access and less on the synchronization. For example, in contemporary RMA programming systems, the widely used producer-consumer pattern can only be implemented inefficiently, incurring in an overhead of an additional round-trip message. We propose Notified Access, a scheme where the target process of an access can receive a completion notification. This scheme enables direct and efficient synchronization with a minimum number of messages. We implement our scheme in an open source MPI-3 RMA library and demonstrate lower overheads (two cache misses) than other point-to-point synchronization mechanisms for each notification. We also evaluate our implementation on three real-world benchmarks, a stencil computation, a tree computation, and a Colicky factorization implemented with tasks. Our scheme always performs better than traditional message passing and other existing RMA synchronization schemes, providing up to 50% speedup on small messages. Our analysis shows that Notified Access is a valuable primitive for any RMA system. Furthermore, we provide guidance for the design of low-level network interfaces to support Notified Access efficiently.
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Publication status
published
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Book title
2015 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)
Journal / series
Volume
Pages / Article No.
871 - 881
Publisher
IEEE
Event
29th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2015)
Edition / version
Methods
Software
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Date collected
Date created
Subject
RMA; Synchronization; Notification; MPI
Organisational unit
03950 - Hoefler, Torsten / Hoefler, Torsten