Softening Up the Network for Scientific Applications
Célio Trois, Luis C. E. Bona, Marcos Didonet Del Fabro, Magnos Martinello, Sarvesh Bidkar, Reza Nejabati, Dimitra E. Simeonidou · 2017
Scientific applications demand huge computational power connected through fast networks. They are developed using parallel kernel methods, usually implemented with the Message Passing Interface (MPI), presenting well-behaved communication patterns across computing nodes. The current network technologies do not allow defining traffic forwarding policies considering the different application traffic, resulting in an unbalanced load on the network links. Moreover, the devices are not concerned if the traffic is latency-sensitive or bandwidth-intensive. To handle this, we present NetSA, a framework exploiting the communication patterns of scientific applications, considering latency and bandwidth constraints, as the key logic for evenly placing the application flows on the network available paths. Through NetSA, the scientific application developer can easily modify the network behavior to best fit the application communication requirements. We have performed experiments for optimizing the MPI communication primitives and applied our solution to speed up scientific applications, obtaining an execution time reduction up to 27%.