A Hybrid MPI design using SCTP and iWARP

Abstract

Remote direct memory access (RDMA) and point- to-point network fabrics both have their own advantages. MPI middleware implementations typically use one or the other, however, the appearance of the Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP), RDMA over IP, and protocol off-load devices introduces the opportunity to use a hybrid design for MPI middleware that uses both iWARP and a transport protocol directly. We explore the design of a new MPICH2 channel device based on iWARP and the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) that uses SCTP for all point-to-point MPI routines and iWARP for all remote memory access routines (i.e., one-sided communication). The design extends the Ohio Supercomputer Center software- based iWARP stack and our MPICH2 SCTP-based channel device. The hybrid channel device aligns the semantics of the MPI routine with the underlying protocol that best supports the routine and also allows the MPI API to exploit the potential performance benefits of the underlying hardware more directly. We describe the design and issues related to the progress engine design and connection setup. We demonstrate how to implement iWARP over SCTP rather than TCP and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. We are not aware of any other software implementations of iWARP over SCTP, nor MPI middleware that uses both iWARP verbs and the SCTP API.