Co-Design and Evaluation of a CPU-Free MPI GPU Communication Abstraction and Implementation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bridges, Patrick G., Schafer, Derek, Lange, Jack, White III, James B., Skjellum, Anthony, Suggs, Evan, Hines, Thomas, Bangalore, Purushotham, Dosanjh, Matthew G. F., Schonbein, Whit
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Bridges, Patrick G.
Schafer, Derek
Lange, Jack
White III, James B.
Skjellum, Anthony
Suggs, Evan
Hines, Thomas
Bangalore, Purushotham
Dosanjh, Matthew G. F.
Schonbein, Whit
author_facet Bridges, Patrick G.
Schafer, Derek
Lange, Jack
White III, James B.
Skjellum, Anthony
Suggs, Evan
Hines, Thomas
Bangalore, Purushotham
Dosanjh, Matthew G. F.
Schonbein, Whit
contents Removing the CPU from the communication fast path is essential to efficient GPU-based ML and HPC application performance. However, existing GPU communication APIs either continue to rely on the CPU for communication or rely on APIs that place significant synchronization burdens on programmers. In this paper we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of an MPI-based GPU communication API enabling easy-to-use, high-performance, CPU-free communication. This API builds on previously proposed MPI extensions and leverages HPE Slingshot 11 network card capabilities. We demonstrate the utility and performance of the API by showing how the API naturally enables CPU-free gather/scatter halo exchange communication primitives in the Cabana/Kokkos performance portability framework, and through a performance comparison with Cray MPICH on the Frontier and Tuolumne supercomputers. Results from this evaluation show up to a 50% reduction in medium message latency in simple GPU ping-pong exchanges and a 28% speedup improvement when strong scaling a halo-exchange benchmark to 8,192 GPUs of the Frontier supercomputer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_15356
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Co-Design and Evaluation of a CPU-Free MPI GPU Communication Abstraction and Implementation
Bridges, Patrick G.
Schafer, Derek
Lange, Jack
White III, James B.
Skjellum, Anthony
Suggs, Evan
Hines, Thomas
Bangalore, Purushotham
Dosanjh, Matthew G. F.
Schonbein, Whit
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Removing the CPU from the communication fast path is essential to efficient GPU-based ML and HPC application performance. However, existing GPU communication APIs either continue to rely on the CPU for communication or rely on APIs that place significant synchronization burdens on programmers. In this paper we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of an MPI-based GPU communication API enabling easy-to-use, high-performance, CPU-free communication. This API builds on previously proposed MPI extensions and leverages HPE Slingshot 11 network card capabilities. We demonstrate the utility and performance of the API by showing how the API naturally enables CPU-free gather/scatter halo exchange communication primitives in the Cabana/Kokkos performance portability framework, and through a performance comparison with Cray MPICH on the Frontier and Tuolumne supercomputers. Results from this evaluation show up to a 50% reduction in medium message latency in simple GPU ping-pong exchanges and a 28% speedup improvement when strong scaling a halo-exchange benchmark to 8,192 GPUs of the Frontier supercomputer.
title Co-Design and Evaluation of a CPU-Free MPI GPU Communication Abstraction and Implementation
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15356