High-Performance and Scalable MPI over InfiniBand with Reduced Memory Usage: An In-Depth performance Analysis

InfiniBand is an emerging HPC interconnect being deployed in very large scale clusters, with even larger InfiniBand-based clusters expected to be deployed in the near future. The message passing interface (MPI) is the programming model of choice for scientific applications running on these large scale clusters. Thus, it is very critical for the MPI implementation used to be based on a scalable and high-performance design. We analyze the performance and scalability aspects of MVAPICH, a popular open-source MPI implementation on InfiniBand, from an application standpoint. We analyze the performance and memory requirements of the MPI library while executing several well-known applications and benchmarks, such as NAS, SuperLU, NAMD, and HPL on a 64-node InfiniBand cluster. Our analysis reveals that latest design of MVAPICH requires an order of magnitude less internal MPI memory (average per process) and yet delivers the best possible performance. Further, we observe that for these benchmarks and applications evaluated, the internal memory requirement of MVAPICH remains nearly constant at around 5-10 MB as the number of processes increase, indicating that the MVAPICH design is highly scalable