Examining MPI and its Extensions for Asynchronous Multithreaded Communication

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yan, Jiakun, Snir, Marc, Guo, Yanfei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yan, Jiakun
Snir, Marc
Guo, Yanfei
author_facet Yan, Jiakun
Snir, Marc
Guo, Yanfei
contents The increasing complexity of HPC architectures and the growing adoption of irregular scientific algorithms demand efficient support for asynchronous, multithreaded communication. This need is especially pronounced with Asynchronous Many-Task (AMT) systems. This communication pattern was not a consideration during the design of the original MPI specification. The MPI community has recently introduced several extensions to address these evolving requirements. This work evaluates two such extensions, the Virtual Communication Interface (VCI) and the Continuation extensions, in the context of an established AMT runtime HPX. We begin by using an MPI-level microbenchmark, modeled from HPX's low-level communication mechanism, to measure the peak performance potential of these extensions. We then integrate them into HPX to evaluate their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Our results show that while these extensions can enhance performance compared to standard MPI, areas for improvement remain. The current continuation proposal limits the maximum multithreaded message rate achievable in the multi-VCI setting. Furthermore, the recommended one-VCI-per-thread mode proves ineffective in real-world systems due to the attentiveness problem. These findings underscore the importance of improving intra-VCI threading efficiency to achieve scalable multithreaded communication and fully realize the benefits of recent MPI extensions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18667
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Examining MPI and its Extensions for Asynchronous Multithreaded Communication
Yan, Jiakun
Snir, Marc
Guo, Yanfei
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The increasing complexity of HPC architectures and the growing adoption of irregular scientific algorithms demand efficient support for asynchronous, multithreaded communication. This need is especially pronounced with Asynchronous Many-Task (AMT) systems. This communication pattern was not a consideration during the design of the original MPI specification. The MPI community has recently introduced several extensions to address these evolving requirements. This work evaluates two such extensions, the Virtual Communication Interface (VCI) and the Continuation extensions, in the context of an established AMT runtime HPX. We begin by using an MPI-level microbenchmark, modeled from HPX's low-level communication mechanism, to measure the peak performance potential of these extensions. We then integrate them into HPX to evaluate their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Our results show that while these extensions can enhance performance compared to standard MPI, areas for improvement remain. The current continuation proposal limits the maximum multithreaded message rate achievable in the multi-VCI setting. Furthermore, the recommended one-VCI-per-thread mode proves ineffective in real-world systems due to the attentiveness problem. These findings underscore the importance of improving intra-VCI threading efficiency to achieve scalable multithreaded communication and fully realize the benefits of recent MPI extensions.
title Examining MPI and its Extensions for Asynchronous Multithreaded Communication
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18667