Efficient reliable broadcast for commodity clusters

Abstract

High-speed collective communication is the key to achieve high-performance computing in parallel computing. In the past, collective operations are usually implemented using unicast operations. We proposed a new architecture EQA (Enhanced Queue Architecture) for implementing high-speed collective operations in a cluster. With the incorporation of EQA and the hardware broadcast facility in network switches, an efficient reliable broadcast operation is implemented in a DP-SMP communication subsystem. With EQA, the computation, memory and network resources can be utilized efficiently. We evaluated the performance of the broadcast operation in a commodity cluster with fast Ethernet connection. We found that the hardware-based broadcast from DP-SMP with EQA outperforms the software-based broadcast operation. The use of EQA in broadcast operation could reduce the memory consumption by almost 40%. DP-SMP with EQA has proven to be an efficient communication mechanism for coupling commodity clusters.