APEnet+: a 3D toroidal network enabling Petaflops scale Lattice QCD simulations on commodity clusters

TL;DR

APEnet+ is a scalable 3D toroidal interconnect designed for large GPU clusters, enabling efficient Petaflops-scale Lattice QCD simulations with low latency and high bandwidth.

Contribution

It introduces APEnet+, a new interconnect with hardware support for RDMA and GPU acceleration, scalable to tens of thousands of nodes with linear cost.

Findings

Supports Petaflops-scale Lattice QCD simulations

Provides low latency and high bandwidth networking

Enables scalable GPU cluster performance

Abstract

Many scientific computations need multi-node parallelism for matching up both space (memory) and time (speed) ever-increasing requirements. The use of GPUs as accelerators introduces yet another level of complexity for the programmer and may potentially result in large overheads due to the complex memory hierarchy. Additionally, top-notch problems may easily employ more than a Petaflops of sustained computing power, requiring thousands of GPUs orchestrated with some parallel programming model. Here we describe APEnet+, the new generation of our interconnect, which scales up to tens of thousands of nodes with linear cost, thus improving the price/performance ratio on large clusters. The project target is the development of the Apelink+ host adapter featuring a low latency, high bandwidth direct network, state-of-the-art wire speeds on the links and a PCIe X8 gen2 host interface. It features hardware support for the RDMA programming model and experimental acceleration of GPU networking. A Linux kernel driver, a set of low-level RDMA APIs and an OpenMPI library driver are available, allowing for painless porting of standard applications. Finally, we give an insight of future work and intended developments.