HCA aware Parallel Communication Library: A feasibility study for offloading MPI requirements

Abstract

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized message passing system, independent of underlying network, and the most widely used parallel programming paradigm. The communication library should make full use of the Host Channel Adapter (HCA) characteristics to maximize performance of the HPC cluster. The communication library may not able to take full advantage of the underlying network adapter, if the library is made generalized. This can have a significant impact on the performance.Our primary goal is to develop a network dependent message passing library called a Parallel Communication Library (PCL) that will exploit C-DAC's proprietary PARAMNet HCA features for efficient message transfer. Using PCL, we intend to observe the feasibility of the network and performance enhancement for additional features. The objective is to carry out different trials by implementing additional features and analyze the implications which would give us more insight towards suitability of transport offload/onload mechanism. This experimentation would give us feedbacks for designing the next generation architecture.