Developing a Communication Intensive Application on the EARTH Multithreaded Architecture

Abstract

This paper reports a study of sparse matrix vector multiplication on a parallel distributed memory machine called EARTH, which supports a fine-grain multithreaded program execution model on off-the-shelf processors. Such sparse computations, when parallelized without graph partitioning, have a high communication to computation ratio, and are well known to have limited scalability on traditional distributed memory machines. EARTH offers a number of features which should make it a promising architecture for this class of applications, including local synchronizations, low communication overheads, ability to overlap communication and computation, and low context-switching costs. On the NAS CG benchmark Class A inputs, we achieve linear speedups on the 20-node MANNA platform, and an absolute speedup of 79 on 120 nodes on a simulated extension. The speedup improves to 90 on 120 nodes for Class B. This is achieved without inspector/executor, graph partitioning, or any communication minimization phase, which means that similar results can be expected for adaptive problems.

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