A novel MPI reduction algorithm resilient to imbalances in process arrival times

Reduction algorithms are optimized only under the assumption that all processes commence the reduction simultaneously. Research on process arrival times has shown that this is rarely the case. Thus, all benchmarking methodologies that take into account only balanced arrival times might not portray a true picture of real-world algorithm performance. In this paper, we select a subset of four reduction algorithms frequently used by library implementations and evaluate their performance for both balanced and imbalanced process arrival times. The main contribution of this paper is a novel imbalance robust algorithm that uses pre-knowledge of process arrival times to construct reduction schedules. The performance of selected algorithms was empirically evaluated on a 128 node subset of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe CURIE supercomputer. The reported results show that the new imbalance robust algorithm universally outperforms all the selected algorithms, whenever the reduction schedule is precomputed. We find that when the cost of schedule construction is included in the total runtime, the new algorithm outperforms the selected algorithms for problem sizes greater than 1 MiB.

Publication year:2016

Keywords:MPI, Reduction, Process arrival, Process skew, System Noise, Collective operations