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Processor affinity and MPI performance on SMP-CMP clusters
Conference proceeding   Peer reviewed

Processor affinity and MPI performance on SMP-CMP clusters

Chi Zhang, Xin Yuan and Ashok Srinivasan
2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum (IPDPSW), p.1
IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum (IPDPSW) (Atlanta, GA, 04/19/2010–04/23/2010)
04/2010
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPSW.2010.5470774

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Abstract

Clusters of Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP) nodes with multi-core Chip-Multiprocessors (CMP), also known as SMP-CMP clusters, are becoming ubiquitous today. For Message Passing interface (MPI) programs, such clusters have a multi-layer hierarchical communication structure: the performance of intra-node communication is usually higher than that of inter-node communication; and the performance of intra-node communication is not uniform with communications between cores within a chip offering higher performance than communications between cores in different chips. As a result, the mapping from Message Passing Interface (MPI) processes to cores within each compute node, that is, processor affinity, may significantly affect the performance of intra-node communication, which in turn may impact the overall performance of MPI applications. In this work, we study the impacts of processor affinity on MPI performance in SMP-CMP clusters through extensive benchmarking and identify the conditions when processor affinity is (or is not) a major factor that affects performance.

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