September 2007

Conference Paper

A Case for Standard Non-Blocking Collective Operations

By:
Hoefler, Torsten; Kambadur, Prabhanjan; Graham, Richard L; Shipman, Galen; Lumsdaine, Andrew
Page Number:
N/A
Book Title:
Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface
Publication Date:
September 2007
Conference Name:
EuroPVM/MPI 2007
Conference Location:
Paris, France
Conference Sponsor:
Inria

Abstract

In this paper we make the case for adding standard non-blocking collective operations to the MPI standard. The non-blocking point-to-point and blocking collective operations currently defined by MPI provide important performance and abstraction benefits. To allow these benefits to be simultaneously realized, we present an application programming interface for non-blocking collective operations in MPI. Microbenchmark and application-based performance results demonstrate that non-blocking collective operations offer not only improved convenience, but improved performance as well, when compared to manual use of threads with blocking collectives.