Abstract
MPI implementations that support the highest level of thread safety for user programs, MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE, are becoming widely available. Users often expect that different threads can execute independently and that the MPI implementation can provide the necessary level of thread safety with only a small overhead. The MPI Standard, however, requires only that no MPI call in one thread block MPI calls in other threads; it makes no performance guarantees. Therefore, some way of measuring an implementation’s performance is needed. In this paper, we propose a number of performance tests that are motivated by typical application scenarios. These tests cover the overhead of providing the MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE level of thread safety for user programs, the amount of concurrency in different threads making MPI calls, the ability to overlap communication with computation, and other features. We present performance results with this test suite on several platforms (Linux cluster, Sun and IBM SMPs) and MPI implementations (MPICH2, Open MPI, IBM, and Sun).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
GarcĂa, F., CalderĂłn, A., Carretero, J.: MiMPI: A multithread-safe implementation of MPI. In: Margalef, T., Dongarra, J.J., Luque, E. (eds.) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. LNCS, vol. 1697, pp. 207–214. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Gropp, W., Thakur, R.: Issues in developing a thread-safe MPI implementation. In: Mohr, B., Träff, J.L., Worringen, J., Dongarra, J. (eds.) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. LNCS, vol. 4192, pp. 12–21. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Intel MPI benchmarks, http://www.intel.com
OSU MPI benchmarks, http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu/benchmarks
Protopopov, B.V., Skjellum, A.: A multithreaded message passing interface (MPI) architecture: Performance and program issues. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 61(4), 449–466 (2001)
Reussner, R., Sanders, P., Träff, J.L.: SKaMPI: A comprehensive benchmark for public benchmarking of MPI. Scientific Programming 10(1), 55–65 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Thakur, R., Gropp, W. (2007). Test Suite for Evaluating Performance of MPI Implementations That Support MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE . In: Cappello, F., Herault, T., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4757. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75416-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75416-9_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75415-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75416-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)