CH4 Process Address Translation

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MPI processes are logically represented as integer ranks within communicators, while MPI implementation internally maintains the physical network addresses of different processes. When a MPI program moves data between two processes by addressing them using ranks, the MPI implementation needs to translate these ranks into the their corresponding network address before the communication can take place. In current MPICH, the management of network address relies on two data structures:

  1. virtual connections (VCs) which contain network physical addresses and their associated data structures
  2. virtual connection reference tables (VCRTs) which contain the mapping between logical ranks to the VCs of the corresponding processes

High Memory Usage of VC and VCRT

As each processes need to maintain the network address for its peer-process, the VCs in each process consumes O(P) memory, where P is the number of processes. As MPICH evolves, many data structures are packed in the VC object for better cache locality. The size of a typical VC object is 480 bytes. VC alone can consume 360 MB memory in each process when running at full scale of Mira supercomputer (768K processes).

Similarly, each VCRT requires O(P) memory where P is the number of ranks in the communicator. Given the fact that each communicator can order the ranks in arbitrary order, n communicators will results in O(nP) memory usage.

Regular Process Mapping Models

In practical, most MPI application follow regular patterns when creating communicators. For example, MPI_Comm_dup creates a child COMM with identical ranks in same order as the parent COMM. In this case, it is unnecessary to create a duplicated VCRT for the child COMM. Instead, MPICH will refer to the VCRT of the parent COMM. Some other application may lay processes in a virtual two-dimensional grid and split the processes into row COMM and column COMM. The row COMM's rank mapping would be a subset of ranks in the parent COMM at a fixed offset. The column COMM's rank mapping would be a simple strided lookup based on the parent communicator’s rank mapping.


Address Vector Table

Rank Map

Performance Impact