Noam Bloch

ConnectX-2 InfiniBand Management Queues: First Investigation of the New Support for Network Offloaded Collective Operations

This paper introduces the newly developed Infini- Band (IB) Management Queue capability, used by the Host Channel Adapter (HCA) to manage network task data flow dependancies, and progress the communications associated with such flows. These tasks include sends, receives, and the newly supported wait task, and are scheduled by the HCA based on a data dependency description provided by the user. This functionality is supported by the ConnectX-2 HCA, and provides the means for delegating collective communication management and progress to the HCA, also known as collective communication offload. This provides a means for overlapping collective communications managed by the HCA and computation on the Central Processing Unit (CPU), thus making it possible to reduce the impact of system noise on parallel applications using collective operations. This paper further describes how this new capability can be used to implement scalable Message Passing Interface (MPI) collective operations, describing the high level details of how this new capability is used to implement the MPI Barrier collective operation, focusing on the latency sensitive performance aspects of this new capability. This paper concludes with small scale bench- mark experiments comparing implementations of the barrier collective operation, using the new network offload capabilities, with established point-to-point based implementations of these same algorithms, which manage the data flow using the central processing unit. These early results demonstrate the promise this new capability provides to improve the scalability of high- performance applications using collective communications. The latency of the HCA based implementation of the barrier is similar to that of the best performing point-to-point based implementation managed by the central processing unit, starting to outperform these as the number of processes involved in the collective operation increases.

Overlapping computation and communication: Barrier algorithms and ConnectX-2 CORE-Direct capabilities

This paper explores the computation and communication overlap capabilities enabled by the new CORE-Direct hardware capabilities introduced in the InfiniBand Network Interface Card (NIC) ConnectX-2. We use the latency dominated nonblocking barrier algorithm in this study, and find that at 64 process count, a contiguous time slot of about 80% of the nonblocking barrier time is available for computation. This time slot increases as the number of processes participating increases. In contrast, Central Processing Unit (CPU) based implementations provide a time slot of up to 30% of the nonblocking barrier time. This bodes well for the scalability of simulations employing offloaded collective operations. These capabilities can be used to reduce the effects of system noise, and when using non-blocking collective operations may also be used to hide the effects of application load imbalance.

Network offloaded hierarchical collectives using ConnectX-2's CORE-Direct capabilities

As the scale of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems continues to increase, demanding that we extract even more parallelism from applications, the need to move communication management away from the Central Processing Unit (CPU) becomes even greater. Moving this management to the network, frees up CPU cycles for computation, making it possible to overlap computation and communication. In this paper we continue to investigate how to best use the new CORE-Direct support added in the ConnectX-2 Host Channel Adapter (HCA) for creating high performance, asynchronous collective operations that are managed by the HCA. Specifically we consider the network topology, creating a two-level communication hierarchy, reducing the MPI Barrier completion time by 45%, from 26.59 microseconds, when not considering network topology, to 14.72 microseconds, with the CPU based collective barrier operation completing in 19.04 microseconds. The nonblocking barrier algorithm has similar performance, with about 50% of that time available for computation.