NPAC Technical Report SCCS-667

Communication Strategies for Out-of-core Programs on Distributed Memory Machines

Rajesh Bordawekar, Alok Choudhary

Submitted December 4 1994


Abstract

In this paper, we show that communication in the out-of-core distributed memory problems requires both inter-processor communication and file I/O. Thus, it is important to optimize the I/O costs associated with a communication step. We present three methods for performing communication in out-of-core distributed memory problems. The first method, termed as the "out-of-core" communication method, follows a loosely synchronous model. Computation and Communication phases in this case are clearly separated, and communication requires permutation of data in files. The second method, termed as "demand-driven-in-core communication" considers only communication required of each in-core data slab individually. The third method, termed as "producer-driven-in-core communication" goes even one step further and tries to identify the potential (future) use of data while it is in memory. We describe these methods in detail and provide performance results for out-of-core applications; namely, two-dimensional FFT and two-dimensional elliptic solver. Finally, we discuss how "out-of-core" and "in-core" communication methods could be used in virtual memory environments on distributed memory machines.


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