Overlapping Communications with Other Communications and Its Application to Distributed Dense Matrix Computations

This paper presents the idea of overlapping communications with communications. Communication operations are overlapped, allowing actual data transfer in one operation to be overlaped with synchronization or other overheads in another operation, thus making more effective use of the available network bandwidth. We use two techniques for overlapping communication operations: a novel technique called “nonblocking overlap” that uses MPI-3 nonblocking collective operations and software pipelines, and a simpler technique that uses multiple MPI processes per node to send different portions of data simultaneously. The idea is applied to the parallel dense matrix squaring and cubing kernel in density matrix purification, an important kernel in electronic structure calculations. The kernel is up to 91.2% faster when communication operations are overlapped.