CMB: A Configurable Messaging Benchmark to Explore Fine-Grained Communication
W. Pepper Marts, Donald A. Kruse, Matthew G. F. Dosanjh, Whit Schonbein, Scott Levy, Patrick G. Bridges · 2024
Modern communication APIs provide increased ability to specify when, where, and how to send data between processes. One recent innovation is fine-grained communication, where processes are able to send subsets of data as it is ready rather than waiting for the entirety of the data to be completed. Allowing data to be sent when it is ready increases opportunities for overlapping communication and computation. However, with multiple fine-grained, thread-safe interfaces, the task of optimizing an application’s peer-to-peer fine-grained communication is complex. In this paper, we present the Configurable Messaging Benchmark (CMB), a tool for evaluating the application impact of fine-grained communication. Using the CMB we perform a case study to measure the impact of different fine-grained implementations on a variety of realistic application profiles. Initial results reveal a large optimization space ranging from potential speedups as high as 52.97% to slowdowns as high as 289.55% relative to bulk-synchronous MPI message passing.