Improving All-to-Many Personalized Communication in Two-Phase I/O

As modern parallel computers enter the exascale era, the communication cost for redistributing requests becomes a significant bottleneck in MPI-IO routines. The communication kernel for request redistribution, which has an all-to-many personalized communication pattern for application programs with a large number of noncontiguous requests, plays an essential role in the overall performance. This paper explores the available communication kernels for two-phase I/O communication. We generalize the spread-out algorithm to adapt to the all-to-many communication pattern of two-phase I/O by reducing the communication straggler effect. Communication throttling methods that reduce communication contention for asynchronous MPI implementation are adopted to improve communication performance further. Experimental results are presented using different communication kernels running on Cray XC40 Cori and IBM AC922 Summit supercomputers with different I/O patterns. Our study shows that adjusting communication kernel algorithms for different I/O patterns can improve the end-to-end performance up to 10 times compared with default MPI-IO implementations.