Publications

PaCMap: Topology mapping of unstructured communication patterns onto non-contiguous allocations

Tuncer, Ozan; Leung, Vitus J.; Coskun, Ayse K.

In high performance computing (HPC), applications usually have many parallel tasks running on multiple machine nodes. As these tasks intensively communicate with each other, the communication overhead has a significant impact on an application's execution time. This overhead is determined by the application's communication pattern as well as the network distances between communicating tasks. By mapping the tasks to the available machine nodes in a communication-aware manner, the network distances and the execution times can be significantly reduced. Existing techniques first allocate available nodes to an application, and then map the tasks onto the allocated nodes. In this paper, we discuss the potential benefits of simultaneous allocation and mapping for applications with irregular communication patterns. We also propose a novel graphbased allocation and mapping technique to reduce the execution time in HPC machines that use non-contiguous allocation, such as Cray XK series. Simulations calibrated with real-life experiments show that our technique reduces hop-bytes up to 30% compared to the state-of-the-art.