Non-Data-Communication Overheads in MPI: Analysis on Blue Gene/P

Modern HEC systems, such as Blue Gene/P, rely on achieving high-performance by using the parallelism of a massive number of low-frequency/low-power processing cores. This means that the local pre- and post-communication processing required by the MPI stack might not be very fast, owing to the slow processing cores. Similarly, small amounts of serialization within the MPI stack that were acceptable on small/medium systems can be brutal on massively parallel systems. In this paper, the authors study different non-data-communication overheads within the MPI implementation on the IBM Blue Gene/P system.