A performance instrumentation framework to characterize computation-communication overlap in message-passing systems

Aniruddha G. Shet, P. Sadayappan, David E. Bernholdt, Jarek Nieplocha, Vinod Tipparaju

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Effective overlap of computation and communication is a well understood technique for latency hiding and can yield significant performance gains for applications on high-end computers. In this paper, we propose an instrumentation framework for message-passing systems to characterize the degree of overlap of communication with computation in the execution of parallel applications. The inability to obtain precise time-stamps for pertinent communication events is a significant problem, and is addressed by generation of minimum and maximum bounds on achieved overlap. The overlap measures can aid application developers and system designers in investigating scalability issues. The approach has been used to instrument two MPI implementations as well as the ARMCI system. The implementation resides entirely within the communication library and thus integrates well with existing approaches that operate outside the library. The usefulness of the framework is shown by analyzing available overlap for microbenchmarks and NAS benchmarks, and the insights obtained are used to improve achieved overlap by modifying the NAS SP benchmark.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2006 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Cluster 2006
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Event2006 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Cluster 2006 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: Sep 25 2006Sep 28 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, ICCC
ISSN (Print)1552-5244

Conference

Conference2006 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Cluster 2006
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period09/25/0609/28/06

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