Designing Energy Efficient Communication Runtime Systems: A View from PGAS Models

Journal Article · Thu Oct 06 04:00:00 EDT 2011 · Journal of Supercomputing, 63(3):691-709

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-011-0699-9· OSTI ID:1177358

Vishnu, Abhinav; Song, Shuaiwen; Marquez, Andres; Barker, Kevin J.; Kerbyson, Darren J.; Cameron, Kirk; Balaji, Pavan

As the march to the Exascale computing gains momentum, energy consumption of supercomputers has emerged to be the critical roadblock. While architectural innovations are imperative in achieving computing of this scale, it is largely dependent on the systems software to leverage the architectural innovations. Parallel applications in many computationally intensive domains have been designed to leverage these supercomputers, with legacy two-sided communication semantics using Message Passing Interface. At the same time, Partitioned Global Address Space Models are being designed which provide global address space abstractions and one-sided communication for exploiting data locality and communication optimizations. PGAS models rely on one-sided communication runtime systems for leveraging high-speed networks to achieve best possible performance. In this paper, we present a design for Power Aware One-Sided Communication Library - PASCoL. The proposed design detects communication slack, leverages Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Interrupt driven execution to exploit the detected slack for energy efficiency. We implement our design and evaluate it using synthetic benchmarks for one-sided communication primitives, Put, Get and Accumulate and uniformly non-contiguous data transfers. Our performance evaluation indicates that we can achieve significant reduction in energy consumption without performance loss on multiple one-sided communication primitives. The achieved results are close to the theoretical peak available with the experimental test bed.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1177358
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-80095
• Journal Information: Journal of Supercomputing, 63(3):691-709, Journal Name: Journal of Supercomputing, 63(3):691-709
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English