A hierarchical model to manage hardware topology in MPI applications

International audienceThe MPI standard is a major contribution in the landscape of parallel programming. Since its inception in the mid 90's it has ensured portability and performance for parallel applications on a wide spectrum of machines and architectures. With the advent of multicore machines, understanding and taking into account the underlying physical topology and memory hierarchy have become of paramount importance. The MPI standard in its current state, however, and despite recent evolutions is still unable to offer mechanisms to achieve this. In this paper, we detail several additions to the standard that give the user tools to address the hardware topology and data locality issues while improving application performance

Un modèle hièrarchique pour la gestion de la topologie dans les applications MPI

The MPI standard is a major contribution in the landscape of parallel programming. Since its inception in the mid 90's it has ensured portability and performance for parallel applications on a wide spectrum of machines and architectures. With the advent of multicore machines, understanding and taking into account the underlying physical topology and memory hierarchy as become of paramount importance. The MPI standard in its current state, however, and despite recent evolutions is still unable to offer mechanisms to achieve this. In this paper, we detail several additions to the standard that give the user tools to address the hardware topology and data locality issues while improving application performance.Le standard MPI est une contribution importante dans le domaine de la programmation parallèle. Il est destiné à l'écriture d'applications parallèles pour un large éventail d'architectures parallèles. L'arrivée des machines multicœur implique une compréhension plus fine de la topologie matérielle sous-jacente, notamment en ce qui concerne les hiérarchies mémoire et réseau. Or, dans son statut actuel, MPI ne permet pas de prendre ces aspects en compte. Nous détaillons dans cet article des modifications à MPI pour permettre la prise en compte de ces aspects afind'améliorer les performances applicatives