Design, Implementation, and Performance of MPI on Portals 3.0

Abstract

This paper describes an implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) on the Portals 3.0 data movement layer. Portals 3.0 provides low-level building blocks that are flexible enough to support higher-level message passing layers, such as MPI, very efficiently. Portals 3.0 is also designed to allow for programmable network interface cards to offload message processing from the host processor, allowing for the ability to overlap computation and MPI communication. We describe the basic building blocks in Portals 3.0, show how they can be put together to implement MPI, and describe the protocols of our MPI implementation. We look at several key operations within the implementation and describe the effects that a Portals 3.0 implementation has on scalability and performance. We also present preliminary performance results from our implementation for Myrinet.