Job Startup

Overview

  • Near-constant MPI and OpenSHMEM initialization time at any process count
  • MPI_Init completed under 22 seconds with 229,376 processes on 3,584 KNL nodes. (Courtesy: Jerome Vienne @ TACC)
  • 10x and 30x improvement in startup time of MPI and OpenSHMEM respectively at 16,384 processes
  • Reduce memory consumption by O(ppn)
  • 1GB Memory saved per node @ 1M processes and 16 processes per node

Best Practices for Enhancing Job Startup Performance with MVAPICH2

Launcher Agnostic Optimizations

  • Configuration options
    • ./configure --disable-rdma-cm
      • Disable RDMA_CM
  • Runtime parameters
    • MV2_HOMOGENEOUS_CLUSTER
      • Set to 1 for homogeneous clusters
    • MV2_ON_DEMAND_THRESHOLD
      • Job size after which on-demand connection management should be enabled
      • Set to 1 so that jobs of all sizes use on-demand connection management
    • MV2_ON_DEMAND_UD_INFO_EXCHANGE
      • Set to 1 to enable on-demand creation of UD address handles when MVAPICH2 is run in hybrid mode

Optimizations for SLURM

  • Use PMI2
    • ./configure --with-pm=slurm --with-pmi=pmi2
    • srun --mpi=pmi2 ./a.out
  • Use PMI Extensions
    • Patch for SLURM 15 and 16 available here
    • PMI Extensions are automatically detected and used by MVAPICH2 2.2rc1 and higher

Optimizations for mpirun_rsh

  • MV2_MT_DEGREE
    • Degree of the hierarchical tree used by mpirun_rsh
  • MV2_FASTSSH_THRESHOLD
    • Number of nodes beyond which hierarchical-ssh scheme is used
  • MV2_NPROCS_THRESHOLD
    • Number of nodes beyond which file-based communication is used for hierarchical-ssh during start up

Hardware Specifications

CPU Model CPU Core Info Memory Network Interconnect Switch OS Intel OPA
Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68 cores @ 1.4Ghz 96GB (DDR4) Intel Omni-Path (100Gbps) Intel Omni-Path Switch (100Gbps) RHEL 7 N/A

Performance on Intel Knights Landing + Omni-Path

  • Enhanced job startup performance on KNL+Omni-Path systems with new designs in MVAPICH2-2.3a
  • MPI_Init completed under 22 seconds with 229,376 processes on 3,584 KNL nodes. (Courtesy: Jerome Vienne @ TACC)
  • 8.8 times faster than Intel MPI with 128K processes
  • MPI_Init in 5.8s and Hello World in 21s with 64K processes on Oakforest-PACS
  • Tests run with 64 processes per KNL node

Hardware Specifications

CPU Model CPU Core Info Memory IB Card IB Switch OS OFED
Intel E5-2680 2x8 @ 2.7Ghz 32GB Mellanox ConnectX-3 (56Gbps) Mellanox FDR IB Switch (56Gbps) CentOS 6.7 OFED 1.5.4.1

Shared Memory based PMI

  • Introduced in MVAPICH2-2.2rc1, available with srun slurm patch
  • PMI Get takes 0.25 ms with 32 ppn
  • 1,000 times reduction in PMI Get latency compared to default socket based protocol
  • Memory footprint reduced by O(Processes Per Node) ≈ 1GB @ 1M processes, 16 ppn
  • Backward compatible, negligible overhead

Non-blocking PMI

  • Introduced in MVAPICH2-2.2b, enabled with mpirun_rsh by default for srun with slurm patch
  • Near-constant MPI_Init at any scale
  • MPI_Init with Iallgather performs 288% better than the default based on Fence
  • Blocking Allgather is 38% faster than blocking Fence

PMI Ring Extension

  • Superseded by non-blocking PMI
  • MPI_Init based on PMIX_Ring performs 34% better compared to the default PMI2_KVS_Fence
  • Hello World runs 33% faster with 8K processes
  • Up to 20% improvement in total execution time of NAS parallel benchmarks

On-demand Connection

  • Introduced in MVAPICH2-X 2.1rc1, click here for more information
  • 29.6 times faster initialization time
  • Hello world performs 8.31 times better
  • Execution time of NAS benchmarks improved by up to 35% with 256 processes and class B data