MPI Interface

One-sided Communication in MPI

Motivation

• The receiver does not know how much data to expect (non-conforming).

• Avoid send/recv delay.

Basic Idea

The basic idea of one-sided communication models is to decouple data movement with process synchronization.

• Should be able to move data without requiring that the remote process synchronize

• Each process exposes a part of its memory to other processes

• Other processes can directly read from or write to this memory

In one-sided MPI operations, also known as RDMA or RMA (Remote Memory Access) operation.

Advantages of RMA Operations

• Can do multiple data transfers with a single synchronization operation

• Bypass tag matching

• Some irregular communication patterns can be more economically expressed

• Can be significantly faster than send/receive on systems with hardware support for remote memory access, such as shared memory systems.

Irregular Communication Patterns with RMA

• If communication pattern is not known a priori, but the data locations are known, the send-receive model requires an extra step to determine how many sends-receives to issue

• RMA, however, can handle it easily because only the origin or target process needs to issue the put or get call

• This makes dynamic communication easier to code in RMA

Creating Public Memory

• Any memory created by a process is, by default, only locally accessible

• Once the memory is created, the user has to make an explicit MPI call to declare a memory region as remotely accessible

  • MPI terminology for remotely accessible memory is a“window”

  • A group of processes collectively create a “window object”

• Once a memory region is declared as remotely accessible, all processes in the window object can read/write data to this memory without explicitly synchronizing with the target process

Basic RMA Functions for Communication

• MPI_Win_create exposes local memory to RMA operation by other processes in a communicator

• Creates window object MPI_Win_free deallocates window object

• MPI_Win_Create_Dynamic creates an RMA window, to which data can later be attached.

  • Only data exposed in a window can be accessed with RMA ops

  • Initially “empty”

  • Application can dynamically attach/detach memory to this window by calling MPI_Win_attach/detach

  • Application can access data on this window only after a memory region has been attached

• MPI_Put moves data from local memory to remote memory

• MPI_Get retrieves data from remote memory into local memory

• MPI_Accumulate updates remote memory using local values

Data movement operations are non-blocking.

Subsequent synchronization on window object needed to ensure operation is completed.

Parallel I/O

I/O in HPC Applications

High Performance Computing (HPC) applications often

• Read initial conditions or datasets for processing

• Write numerical data from simulations

  • Saving application-level checkpoints

• In case of large distributed HPC applications, the total execution time can be broken down into the computation time, communication time, and the I/O time

• Optimizing the time spent in computation, communication and I/O can lead to overall improvement in the application performance

• However, doing efficient I/O without stressing out the HPC system is challenging and often an afterthought

Addressing the I/O Bottlenecks

• Software support for parallel I/O is available in the form of

  • Parallel distributed file systems that provide parallel data paths to storage disks

  • MPI I/O

  • Libraries like PHDF5, pNetCDF

  • High-level libraries like T3PIO

• Understand the I/O strategies for maintaining good citizenship on a supercomputing resource

Real-World Scenario

Parallel Programs Doing Sequential I/O

Parallel I/O - One file per process

Parallel I/O - Shared file (What we want)

MPI I/O

• Defined in the MPI standard since 2.0

  • Uses MPI datatypes to describe files

  • Uses send/receive like operations to read/write data

  • Common interface for all platform/languages

• Provides high-performance (parallel) I/O operations

HDF5: Hierarchical Data Format

HDF5 Nice Features

• Interface support for C, C++, Fortran, Java, and Python

• Supported by data analysis packages (Matlab, IDL, Mathematica, Octave, Visit, Paraview, Tekplot, etc. )

• Machine independent data storage format

• Supports user defined datatypes and metadata

• Read or write to a portion of a dataset (Hyperslab)

• Runs on almost all systems

PHDF5 Overview

• PHDF5 is the Parallel HDF5 library.

  • You can write one file in parallel efficiently!

  • Parallel performance of HDF5 very close to MPI I/O.

• Uses MPI I/O (Don’t reinvent the wheel)

• MPI I/O techniques apply to HDF5.