A Speculative and Adaptive MPI Rendezvous Protocol Over RDMA-enabled Interconnects

Overlapping computation with communication is a key technique to conceal the effect of communication latency on the performance of parallel applications. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a widely used message passing standard for high performance computing. One of the most important factors in achieving a good level of overlap is the MPI ability to make progress on outstanding communication operations. In this paper, we propose a novel speculative MPI Rendezvous protocol that uses RDMA Read and RDMA Write to effectively improve communication progress and consequently the overlap ability. Performance results based on a modified MPICH2 implementation over 10-Gigabit iWARP Ethernet reveal a significant (80–100%) improvement in receiver side overlap and progress ability. We have also observed up to 30% improvement in application wait time for some NPB applications as well as the RADIX application. For applications that do not benefit from this protocol, an adaptation mechanism is used to stop the speculation to effectively reduce the protocol overhead.