PGMPI: Automatically Verifying Self-Consistent MPI Performance Guidelines

Abstract: The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the most commonly used application programming interface for process communication on current large-scale parallel systems. Due to the scale and complexity of modern parallel architectures, it is becoming increasingly difficult to optimize MPI libraries, as many factors can influence the communication performance. To assist MPI developers and users, we propose an automatic way to check whether MPI libraries respect self-consistent performance guidelines for collective communication operations. We introduce the PGMPI framework to detect violations of performance guidelines through benchmarking. Our experimental results show that PGMPI can pinpoint undesired and often unexpected performance degradations of collective MPI operations. We demonstrate how to overcome performance issues of several libraries by adapting the algorithmic implementations of their respective collective MPI calls.