Opportunities and Challenges of Modern Communication Architectures: Case Study with QsNet
Authors:
Sameer Kumar and L. V. Kale
Parallel Programming Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
To be presented at the CAC Workshop at IPDPS 2004
We describe our efforts to scale message driven applications to a large number of processors on an alpha cluster interconnected by QsNet. The clustering technology QsNet has a network interface with a communication co-processor. The presence of the co-processor minimizes main processor participation in message passing. We show the advantages of the communication co-processor for message driven applications. To scale fine-grained message driven applications to a large number of processors we had to overcome several hardware, software and operating system hindrances. We describe them in detail and present solutions for them. We use NAMD, a molecular dynamics program, as a case study for many of our performance optimizations.