Generalized hierarchical all-to-all exchange patterns

Abstract

The personalized all-to-all collective exchange is one of the most challenging communication patterns in HPC applications in terms of performance and scalability. We present a framework for the design of optimized collective patterns for generic hierarchical topologies. Our proposal can be applied, among others, to two types of topologies of great importance today: (i) the family of extended generalized fat tree networks (including k-ary n-trees and their variations) which are extensively used today in both HPC and commercial data centers, and (ii) direct low-diameter scalable hierarchical architectures such as the recently proposed dragonfly networks. We argue that exchange patterns that are congruent with the underlying structure of the network have inherent advantages compared to patterns that are oblivious to this structure. However, the current commonly used hierarchical pattern, the XOR exchange, has limited applicability, because it requires that the number of communicating nodes equals an integral power of two, making it suitable only for few tree designs and unsuitable for any dragonfly network. We propose several new, generic, universally applicable approaches to perform such exchanges in a hierarchical fashion that outperform current state of the art approaches. We support our claims by means of both mathematical proofs and simulation results that show that we can achieve an improvement of almost two-fold in dragonflies, and a two-to three-fold improvement in fat tree networks in cases where the XOR exchange cannot be applied. © 2013 IEEE.