Copyright Notice:

The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a noncommercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Publications of SPCL

T. Hoefler, A. Lumsdaine:

 Message Progression in Parallel Computing - To Thread or not to Thread?

(. Vol , Nr. , In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, presented in Tsukuba, Japan, pages , IEEE Computer Society, ISSN: 1552-5244, ISBN: 978-1-4244-2640, Oct. 2008)

Abstract

Message progression schemes that enable communication and computation to be overlapped have the potential to improve the performance of parallel applications. With currently available high-performance networks there are several options for making progress: manual progression, use of a progress thread, and communication offload. In this paper we analyze threaded progression approaches, comparing the effects of using shared or dedicated CPU cores for progression. To perform these comparisons, we propose time-based and work-based benchmark schemes. As expected, threaded progression performs well when a spare core is available to be dedicated to communication progression, but a number of operating system effects prevent the same benefits from being obtained when communication progress must share a core with computation. We show that some limited performance improvement can be obtained in the shared-core case by real-time scheduling of the progress thread.

Documents

download article:
download slides:
 

BibTeX

@inproceedings{hoefler-ib-threads,
  author={Torsten Hoefler and Andrew Lumsdaine},
  title={{Message Progression in Parallel Computing - To Thread or not to Thread?}},
  journal={},
  institution={},
  year={2008},
  month={10},
  pages={},
  volume={},
  number={},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing},
  location={Tsukuba, Japan},
  publisher={IEEE Computer Society},
  issn={1552-5244},
  isbn={978-1-4244-2640},
}