Tuning MPI Applications for Peak Performance
MPI is now widely accepted as a standard for message-passing parallel
computing libraries. Both applications and important benchmarks are being
ported from other message-passing libraries to MPI. In most cases it is
possible to make a translation in a fairly straightforward way, preserving the
semantics of the original program. On the other hand, MPI provides many
opportunities for increasing the performance of parallel applications by the
use of some of its more advanced features, and straightforward translations of
existing programs might not take advantage of these features. New parallel
applications are also being written in MPI, and an understanding of
performance-critical issues for message-passing programs, along with an
explanation of how to address these using MPI, can provide the application
programmer with the ability to provide a greater percentage of the peak
performance of the hardware to his application. This tutorial discusses
performance-critical issues in message passing programs, explain how to
examine the performance of an application using MPI-oriented tools, and show
how the features of MPI can be used to attain peak application performance.
The Presentation
The talk, Tuning MPI Applications for Peak Performance,
is available in several forms:
- Powerpoint (requires a Powerpoint viewer)
- HTML (exported as HTML from Powerpoint)
A short version of this talk is also
available in HTML form.
Also available are indvidual parts of the tutorial:
The Programs
The programs used in this tutorial are available in
Tutorial examples.
Part 3 of these examples (in the directory src3) may be used
to characterize an MPI implementation.
A gzip'ed tar file
containing the programs is available.