TRAM: Optimizing Fine-Grained Communication with Topological Routing and Aggregation of Messages

Abstract

Fine-grained communication in supercomputing applications often limits performance through high communication overhead and poor utilization of network bandwidth. This paper presents Topological Routing and Aggregation Module (TRAM), a library that optimizes fine-grained communication performance by routing and dynamically combining short messages. TRAM collects units of fine-grained communication from the application and combines them into aggregated messages with a common intermediate destination. It routes these messages along a virtual mesh topology mapped onto the physical topology of the network. TRAM improves network bandwidth utilization and reduces communication overhead. It is particularly effective in optimizing patterns with global communication and large message counts, such as all-to-all and many-to-many, as well as sparse, irregular, dynamic or data dependent patterns. We demonstrate how TRAM improves performance through theoretical analysis and experimental verification using benchmarks and scientific applications. We present speedups on petascale systems of 6x for communication benchmarks and up to 4x for applications.