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Message Passing and Shared Address Space Parallelism on an SMP ClusterCurrently, message passing (MP) and shared address space (SAS) are the two leading parallel programming paradigms. MP has been standardized with MPI, and is the more common and mature approach; however, code development can be extremely difficult, especially for irregularly structured computations. SAS offers substantial ease of programming, but may suffer from performance limitations due to poor spatial locality and high protocol overhead. In this paper, we compare the performance of and the programming effort required for six applications under both programming models on a 32-processor PC-SMP cluster, a platform that is becoming increasingly attractive for high-end scientific computing. Our application suite consists of codes that typically do not exhibit scalable performance under shared-memory programming due to their high communication-to-computation ratios and/or complex communication patterns. Results indicate that SAS can achieve about half the parallel efficiency of MPI for most of our applications, while being competitive for the others. A hybrid MPI+SAS strategy shows only a small performance advantage over pure MPI in some cases. Finally, improved implementations of two MPI collective operations on PC-SMP clusters are presented.
Document ID
20030002771
Acquisition Source
Ames Research Center
Document Type
Preprint (Draft being sent to journal)
Authors
Shan, Hongzhang (California Univ., Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Berkeley, CA United States)
Singh, Jaswinder P. (Princeton Univ. NJ United States)
Oliker, Leonid (California Univ., Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Berkeley, CA United States)
Biswas, Rupak (NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA United States)
Biegel, Bryan
Date Acquired
September 7, 2013
Publication Date
October 1, 2002
Subject Category
Computer Systems
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: DE-AC03-76SF-000098
CONTRACT_GRANT: NSF ESS-98-06751
PROJECT: RTOP 704-40-24
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.

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