The Fast and Scalable MPI Application Launch of the Tianhe HPC system

Yiqin Dai, Yong Dong, Min Xie, Kai Lu, Ruibo Wang, Mingtian Shao, Juan Chen

Abstract: Fast and scalable MPI application launch helps achieve exascale performance and is becoming a common goal in high-performance computing. However, the traditional launch technique suffers from scalability deficiencies in the global information exchange and the global barrier operation. This drawback makes it challenging to launch MPI applications quickly in large-scale systems. In this paper, we propose a fast and scalable application launch technique and details its associated hardware and software support. The optimized launch technique includes a locality-aware static address generation rule for eliminating the need for address exchange and a topology-aware global communication scheme for improving global communication efficiency. We also propose an optimized application launch sequence for supporting the above launch technique. We implement and evaluate the proposed launch technique on the Tianhe-2A supercomputer and the Tianhe Exascale Prototype Upgrade System. Experimental results show that our technique can reduce the launch time by 26.1% when launching an application with 256K processes.