SLOAVx: Scalable LOgarithmic AlltoallV Algorithm for Hierarchical Multicore Systems

Abstract

Scientific applications use collective communication operations in Message Passing Interface (MPI) for global synchronization and data exchanges. Alltoall and AlltoallV are two important collective operations. They are used by MPI jobs to exchange messages among all of MPI processes. AlltoallV is a generalization of Alltoall, supporting messages of varying sizes. However, the existing MPI AlltoallV implementation has linear complexity, i.e., each process has to send messages to all other processes in the job. Such linear complexity can result in sub optimal scalability of MPI applications when they are deployed on millions of cores. To address above challenge, in this paper, we introduce a new Scalable LOgarithmic AlltoallV algorithm, named SLOAV, for MPI AlltoallV collective operation. SLOAV aims to achieve global exchange of small messages of different sizes in a logarithmic number of rounds. Furthermore, given the prevalence of multicore systems with shared memory, we design a hierarchical AlltoallV algorithm based on SLOAV by leveraging the advantages of shared memory, which is referred to as SLOAVx. Compared to SLOAV, SLOAVx significantly reduces the inter-node communication, thus improving the entire system performance and mitigating the impact of message latency. We have implemented and embedded both algorithms in Open MPI. Our evaluation on large-scale computer systems shows that for the 8-byte and 1024-process MPI Alltoallv operation, the SLOAV can reduce the latency by as much as 86.4%, when compared to the state-of-the-art, and SLOAVx can further optimize the SLOAV by up to 83.1% in terms of message latency on multicore systems. In addition, experiments with NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) demonstrate that our algorithms are very effective for real-world applications.