Node-aware stencil communication for heterogeneous supercomputers

Abstract

High-performance distributed computing systems increasingly feature nodes that have multiple CPU sockets and multiple GPUs. The communication bandwidth between these components is non-uniform. Furthermore, these systems can expose different communication capabilities between these components. For communication-heavy applications, optimally using these capabilities is challenging and essential for performance. Bespoke codes with optimized communication may be non-portable across run-time/software/hardware configurations, and existing stencil frameworks neglect optimized communication. This work presents node-aware approaches for automatic data placement and communication implementation for 3D stencil codes on multi-GPU nodes with non-homogeneous communication performance and capabilities. Benchmarking results in the Summit system show that choices in placement can result in a 20% improvement in single-node exchange, and communication specialization can yield a further 6x improvement in exchange time in a single node, and a 16% improvement at 1536 GPUs.