Efficient Asynchronous Communication Progress for MPI without Dedicated Resources

The overlap of computation and communication is critical for good performance of many HPC applications. State-of-the-art designs for the asynchronous progress require specially designed hardware resources (advanced switches or network interface cards), dedicated processor cores or application modification (e.g. use of MPI_Test). These techniques suffer from various issues like increasing code complexity/cost and loss of available compute resources for end applications. In this paper, we take up this challenge and propose a simple yet effective technique to achieve good overlap without needing any additional hardware or software resources. The proposed thread-based design allows MPI libraries to self-detect when asynchronous communication progress is needed and minimizes the number of context-switches and preemption between the main thread and the asynchronous progress thread. We evaluate the proposed design against state-of-the-art designs in other MPI libraries including MVAPICH2, Intel MPI, and Open MPI. We demonstrate benefits of the proposed approach at microbenchmark and at application level at scale on four different architectures including Intel Broadwell, Intel Xeon Phi (KNL), IBM OpenPOWER, and Intel Skylake with InfiniBand and Omni-Path interconnects. Compared to other state-of-the-art designs, our proposed approach shows upto 46%, 37%, and 49% improvement for All-to-one, One-to-all, and All-to-all communication patterns respectively collectives on 1,024 processes. We also show 38% performance improvement for SPEC MPI compute-intensive applications on 384 processes and 44% performance improvement with the P3DFFT application on 448 processes.