Abstract
Nearly all implementations of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) employ a two-level protocol for point-to-point messages. Short messages are sent eagerly to optimize for latency, and long messages are typically implemented using a rendezvous mechanism. In a rendezvous implementation, the sender must first send a request and receive an acknowledgment before the data can be transferred. While there are several possible reasons for using this strategy for long messages, most implementations are forced to use a rendezvous strategy due to operating system and/or network limitations. In this paper, we compare an implementation that uses a rendezvous protocol for long messages with an implementation that adds an eager optimization for long messages. We discuss implementation issues and provide a performance comparison for several micro-benchmarks. We also present a new micro-benchmark that may provide better insight into how these different protocols effect application performance. Results for this new benchmark indicate that, for larger messages, a significant number of receives must be pre-posted in order for an eager protocol optimization to outperform a rendezvous protocol.
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Brightwell, R., Underwood, K. (2003). Evaluation of an Eager Protocol Optimization for MPI. In: Dongarra, J., Laforenza, D., Orlando, S. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2840. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39924-7_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39924-7_46
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20149-6
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