Hello,
I am desparately trying to get better all-to-all performance on Gbit
Ethernet (flow control is enabled). I have been playing around with
several all-to-all schemes and been able to reduce congestion by
communicating in an ordered fashion.
E.g. the simplest scheme looks like
for (i=0; i<ncpu; i++)
{
/* send to dest */
dest = (cpuid + i) % ncpu;
/* receive from source */
source = (ncpu + cpuid - i) % ncpu;
MPI_Sendrecv(sendbuf+dest *sendcount, sendcount, sendtype, dest , 0,
recvbuf+source*recvcount, recvcount, recvtype, source, 0,
comm, &status);
}
For sendcount=32768 and sendtype=float (yields 131072 bytes) the time such
an all-to-all takes is (average over 100 runs, std deviation in () ):
SENDRECV ALLTOALL on 16 PROCS
32768 floats took 0.036783 (0.008798) seconds. Min: 0.034175 max: 0.123684
SENDRECV ALLTOALL on 32 PROCS
32768 floats took 0.082687 (0.035920) seconds. Min: 0.071915 max: 0.285299
For comparison:
MPI_Alltoall on 16 PROCS
32768 floats took 0.057936 (0.073605) seconds. Min: 0.027218 max: 0.275988
MPI_Alltoall on 32 PROCS
32768 floats took 0.137835 (0.100580) seconds. Min: 0.055607 max: 0.412144
The sendrecv all-to-all performs better for these message sizes, but
on 32 CPUs (on 32 nodes) there is still congestion. When I try to separate
the communication phases by putting an MPI_Barrier(MPI_COMM_WORLD) after
the sendrecv, this makes the problem of congestion even worse:
SENDRECV ALLTOALL on 32 PROCS, with Barrier:
32768 floats took 0.179162 (0.136885) seconds. Min: 0.091028 max: 0.729049
How can a barrier lead to more congestion???
Thanks in advance for helpful comments,
Carsten
---------------------------------------------------
Dr. Carsten Kutzner
Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry
Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Department
Am Fassberg 11
37077 Goettingen, Germany
Tel. +49-551-2012313, Fax: +49-551-2012302
eMail ckut...@gwdg.de
http://www.gwdg.de/~ckutzne
