Method and apparatus for dynamic optimization of connection establishment and message progress processing in a multifabric MPI implementation

• US 20070097952A1
• Filed: 10/27/2005
• Published: 05/03/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 10/27/2005
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Intel Corporation
• Original Assignee: Intel Corporation
• Inventors: Supalov, Alexander, Truschin, Vladimir
• Application Number:
  US11/261,998
• Publication Number:
  US 20070097952A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/351
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 13/4234 being a memory bus

Abstract

Connections are established and data passed over a plurality of heterogeneous communication fabrics by maintaining counts of expected connections and established connections over each fabric, and by attempting to establish a new connection only if a connection is expected, and attempting to exchange data over a fabric only if the number of established connections over the fabric is nonzero. Systems and other embodiments are also described and claimed.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

maintaining a first count of a number of connections expected to be established over a plurality of heterogeneous communication fabrics;

maintaining an indicator of connections established over a one of the plurality of fabrics;

attempting to establish a new connection only if the first count is non-zero; and

attempting to exchange data over the fabric only if the indicator shows that a connection was established.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

decrementing the first count if an attempt to establish a new connection is successful.

3. The method of claim 2 wherein the indicator is a second count of connections established over a one of the plurality of fabrics, the method further comprising:

incrementing the second count if the new connection is established over the fabric.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

sorting the plurality of communication fabrics according to a characteristic property; and

attempting to establish a new connection over the plurality of fabrics in an order determined by the sorting.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

sorting the plurality of communication fabrics according to a characteristic property;

iterating over the sorted plurality of fabrics; and

attempting to exchange data over a fabric only if an indicator shows that a connection was established over the fabric.

6. The method of claim 5, further comprising:

terminating the iteration if data is successfully exchanged over a fabric.

7. The method of claim 5 wherein the characteristic property is one of a bandwidth, a typical latency, and a round-trip time.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein the plurality of heterogeneous communication fabrics comprises at least three of shared memory, InfiniBand®

, Myrinet®

, Scalable Coherent Interface, QSNet and Ethernet.

9. A computer-readable medium containing instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform operations comprising:

attempting to establish a connection over a communication fabric if a number of expected connections is greater than zero;

if no connection is established, then iterating over a plurality of different communication fabrics and, for each fabric,

polling for data to exchange if a connection has been established over the fabric; and

terminating the iteration if data are successfully exchanged.

10. The computer-readable medium of claim 9, containing additional instructions to cause the processor to perform operations comprising:

sorting the plurality of different communication fabrics according to a property of the fabric; and

iterating over the plurality of different fabrics in an order established by the sorting.

11. The computer-readable medium of claim 9, containing additional instructions to cause the processor to perform operations comprising:

decrementing the number of expected connections if the attempt to establish a connection is successful.

12. The computer-readable medium of claim 9, containing additional instructions to cause the processor to perform operations comprising:

receiving data from a communication peer over a shared-memory channel.

13. The computer-readable medium of claim 9 wherein the instructions comprise a library to implement a message passing interface (“

MPI”

).

14. The computer-readable medium of claim 9 wherein the instructions comprise a script to direct a compilation process.

15. A system comprising:

a processor;

a memory;

a plurality of different communication interfaces; and

a subroutine to exchange data over at least one of the plurality of interfaces;

wherein

the system is to communicate with a first peer over a first communication interface and with a second peer over a second communication interface; and

the subroutine services an interface only if a connection has been established over the interface.

16. The system of claim 15 wherein the subroutine accepts data over no more than one connection during an invocation of the subroutine.

17. The system of claim 15 wherein the subroutine accepts data over no more than one interface during an invocation of the subroutine.

18. The system of claim 15 wherein the plurality of different communication interfaces comprises at least two of shared memory, InfiniBand®

, Myrinet®

, Scalable Coherent Interface, QSNet and Ethernet.