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An efficient cloud-based elastic RDMA protocol for HPC applications

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Abstract

High-performance computing (HPC) networking is of great importance in scaling many HPC applications across multiple nodes. Generally, most HPC applications deployed on traditional supercomputers or clusters adopt RDMA protocols such as InfiniBand for inter-node networking to mitigate high latency during constant communication. As cloud-based HPC continues to emerge as a significant trend, utilizing RDMA in the cloud has become a challenging problem. To address this problem, We propose an efficient elastic RDMA Protocol (eRDMA) to enabling RDMA’s merits for HPC applications in the cloud. eRDMA applys the direct data movement (DDM) of cloud infrastructure processing Unit (CIPU), overlay of virtual private cloud (VPC), and compatibility for RDMA verbs to fully utilize the elastic resources with the features of RDMA network for HPC scenarios in the cloud. The effectiveness of eRDMA is demonstrated by various experimental results across different platforms for many HPC and general TCP applications.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are not openly available due to reasons of sensitivity and are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Data are located in controlled access data storage at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Cheng Xu, Yunqi Han, Kai Shen, Jinhu Li, Yunqi Han, and Xiangzheng Sun for the help with illustrating the eRDMA, CIPU and NetACC. We also like to thank the THPC reviewers for their helpful comments.

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No funding was received for conducting this study.

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Correspondence to Hang Cao.

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The authors are employees of Alibaba Group and received salaries from Alibaba Group. The research conducted in this paper is related to the products and services of Alibaba Group.

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Cao, H., Xu, C., Han, Y. et al. An efficient cloud-based elastic RDMA protocol for HPC applications. CCF Trans. HPC 6, 45–53 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42514-023-00170-y

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