ECO: Efficient Collective Operations for Communication on Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

PVM and other distributed computing systems have enabled the use of networks of workstations for parallel computation, but their approach of treating a network as a collection of point-to-point connections does not promote efficient communication--- particularly collective communication. ECO is a package which solves this problem with programs which analyze the network and establish efficient communication patterns which are used by a library of collective operations. The analysis is done off-line, so that after paying the one-time cost of analyzing the network, the execution of application programs is not delayed. This paper gives performance results from using ECO to implement the collective communication in CHARMM, a widely used macromolecular dynamics package. ECO facilitates the development of data parallel applications by providing a simple interface to routines which use the available heterogeneous networks efficiently. This approach gives a naive programmer the abili..