UNR: Unified Notifiable RMA Library for HPC

TL;DR

This paper introduces UNR, a unified RMA library for HPC that enhances remote operation notification, improves portability, and boosts application performance, demonstrated with real-world scientific workloads across diverse supercomputers.

Contribution

The paper presents UNR, a novel RMA library that addresses multi-NIC aggregation, portability, and usability issues in HPC environments.

Findings

UNR improves notification and aggregation in RMA operations.

PowerLLEL with UNR achieves up to 36% speedup on large-scale systems.

UNR is deployed successfully across four different HPC systems.

Abstract

Remote Memory Access (RMA) enables direct access to remote memory to achieve high performance for HPC applications. However, most modern parallel programming models lack schemes for the remote process to detect the completion of RMA operations. Many previous works have proposed programming models and extensions to notify the communication peer, but they did not solve the multi-NIC aggregation, portability, hardware-software co-design, and usability problems. In this work, we proposed a Unified Notifiable RMA (UNR) library for HPC to address these challenges. In addition, we demonstrate the best practice of utilizing UNR within a real-world scientific application, PowerLLEL. We deployed UNR across four HPC systems, each with a different interconnect. The results show that PowerLLEL powered by UNR achieves up to a 36% acceleration on 1728 nodes of the Tianhe-Xingyi supercomputing system.