A New End-to-End Flow-Control Mechanism for High Performance Computing Clusters

High Performance Computing usually leverages messaging libraries such as MPI or GASNet in order to exchange data among processes in large-scale clusters. Furthermore, these libraries make use of specialized low-level networking layers in order to retrieve as much performance as possible from hardware interconnects such as InfiniBand or Myrinet, for example. EXTOLL is another emerging technology targeted for high performance clusters. These specialized low-level networking layers require some kind of flow control in order to prevent buffer overflows at the received side. In this paper we present a new flow control mechanism that is able to adapt the buffering resources used by a process according to the parallel application communication pattern and the varying activity among communicating peers. The tests carried out in a 64-node 1024-core EXTOLL cluster show that our new dynamic flow-control mechanism provides extraordinarily high buffer efficiency along with very low overhead, which is reduced between 8 and 10 times.