A communication benchmark tailored to intel broadwell nodes and tuned to the DEAC cluster
Riana J. Freedman, Damian Valles · 2018
Various benchmarks exist for assessing performance characteristics of commodity hardware utilized in high performance computing (HPC) cluster environments. An additional assessment of bandwidth for Intel's 44-core processors considers network saturation via message passing focused on indirectly connected cores. The benchmark developed in this work provides a means of measuring bandwidth of two Broadwell nodes when communicating inter-chassis with all cores of each node utilized. This benchmark was developed in three phases using Message Passing Interface (MPI). First, the bandwidth measure was tested for MPI_Send operations in point-to-point communication. Second, the merge sort algorithm was implemented as a means of assessing bandwidth and a tree-structured communication algorithm was developed and implemented to maximize internode communication and minimize intra-node communication. Third, the benchmark was tuned to the configuration of the Distributed Environment for Academic Computing (DEAC) Cluster. A second benchmark removing local computation from the merge sort algorithm effectively performs a gather operation in a tree-structure. These benchmarks were tested and compared with relevant Intel MPI Benchmarks (IMB) tests. In the developed benchmarks, the nodes requested significantly more bandwidth than in the existing MPI_Gather operation and IMB benchmarks due to the large size of the messages simultaneously placed on the network.