An adaptive extension library for improving collective communication operations

In this paper, we present an adaptive extension library that combines the advantage of using a portable MPI library with the ability to optimize the performance of specific collective communication operations. The extension library is built on top of MPI and can be used with any MPI library. Using the extension library, performance improvements can be achieved by an orthogonal organization of the processors in 2D or 3D meshes and by decomposing the collective communication operations into several consecutive phases of MPI communication. Additional point-to-point-based algorithms are also provided. The extension library works in two steps, an a priori configuration phase detecting possible improvements for implementing collective communication for the MPI library used and an execution phase selecting a better implementation during execution time. This allows an adaptation of the performance of MPI programs to a specific execution platform and communication situation. The experimental evaluation shows that significant performance improvements can be obtained for different MPI libraries by using the library extension for collective MPI communication operations in isolation as well as in the context of application programs. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.