Code controls communication
to boost computer performance
Posted August 27, 2009
As high-performance computers bring more power to programmers, communication often limits an operation’s overall speed.
Even a seemingly simple computing challenge like building a histogram can reveal the need for new approaches to orchestrating parallel interactions between hardware and software. That’s because datasets too large to fit on a single processor’s memory must be spread over multiple processors.
“Randomly reading or writing a distributed data structure like a histogram can be very expensive on large-scale parallel machines,” says Katherine Yelick, professor in the computer science division at the University of California at Berkeley and NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) division director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Other factors, such as the increasing number of processor cores per chip and the difficulty of random-access communication across all of a machine’s cores, further push the limits of today’s parallel computing approaches. Such challenges stimulated the development of Unified Parallel C, better known simply as the UPC language.
Message Passing Interface (MPI) has long been the primary way processors communicate in high-performance computers (HPC), “but people are finding some limitations in it,” says Paul H. Hargrove of the HPC research department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
For instance, if data must be used by multiple processors, MPI often makes copies of that data. In the histogram example, MPI might replicate and later combine instances of the histogram. Even when using nearest-neighbor communication, MPI often replicates some of the data to reduce some forms of communication. As a result, MPI uses up some memory just for copies of data.
UPC tries to resolve some of MPI’s shortcomings, Hargrove says. In particular, UPC takes a new approach to communicating between processors. As a result, a range of experiments show UPC often outperforms MPI – usually by a large margin.
Taking sides
MPI uses so-called two-sided message passing. When passing data between processors, a programmer must use a “send” and a “receive” command; one processor uses “send” to alert another that data are coming, and the target processor uses “receive” to say that it’s ready. The “send” provides the data destination, the length of the information being sent, and so on. An MPI “receive” requires matching information.
