Toward Reproducible Benchmarking of PGAS and MPI Communication Schemes

With the forthcoming age of exascale computing, the efficient support of different programming models has become a crucial performance factor for high-performance computing systems. When adopting novel programming paradigms, the performance assessment through reproducible and comparable benchmarks plays an essential role in both the effective use of the heterogeneous system hardware and the application performance tuning. Alternatives to MPI such as the partitioned global address space (PGAS) model have become increasingly popular. One such PGAS API is the Global Address Space Programming Interface (GASPI). This paper introduces the GASPI Benchmark Suite (GBS), which combines a comprehensive set of microbenchmarks with application kernels. The microbenchmarks target common GASPI communication patterns, including one-sided, collective, passive, and global atomics, while the application kernels stress communication schemes commonly found in real HPC applications. The effectiveness of GBS is demonstrated by evaluating the GASPI communication performance for the networking communication standard InfiniBand.