Authors: Nathan R. Tallent (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Abhinav Vishnu (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Hubertus Van Dam (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Jeff Daily (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Darren Kerbyson (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Adolfy Hoisie (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
Best Poster Finalist
Abstract: Two trends suggest network contention for one-sided messages is poised to become a performance problem that concerns application developers: an increased interest in one-sided programming models and a rising ratio of hardware threads to network injection bandwidth. Unfortunately, it is difficult to reason about network contention and one-sided messages because one-sided tasks can either decrease or increase contention. We present effective and portable techniques for diagnosing the causes and severity of one-sided message contention. We characterize contention for an important computational chemistry benchmark on InfiniBand, Cray Aries, and IBM Blue Gene/Q interconnects. We pinpoint the sources of contention, estimate their severity, and show that when message delivery time deviates from an ideal model, there are other messages contending for the same network links. With a small change to the benchmark, we reduce contention up to 50% and improve total runtime as much as 20%.
