The concept of “Beowulf” clusters, or cheap clusters formed by a network of workstations, increased dramatically the performance-over-price ratio in the high performance computing world. Nevertheless, many domain scientists and engineers using such clusters have realized that the performance they can actually harness is only a fraction of what is available. Two reasons are mainly responsible for this effect. First, the level of complexity required for the communication of an application to be optimized for a particular cluster makes such optimizations out of reach for most non-expert systems programmers. At the same time the lack of portability experienced by applications tuned for a specific cluster led most domain scientists and engineers to follow high-level generic communication solutions in their applications. In this project we use compiler technology to automatically fine-tune applications while preserving the simplicity experienced by the programmer.
Some of the research contributions have been:
ASPHaLT - Anthony Danalis, Lori Pollock, Martin Swany, and John Cavazos. “MPI-aware compiler optimizations for improving communication-computation overlap.” International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS'09), June 2009.
Gravel - Anthony Danalis, Aaron Brown, Lori Pollock, Martin Swany, and John Cavazos. “Gravel: A Communication Library to Fast Path MPI.” EuroPVM/MPI 2008, LNCS 5205, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 111–119. September 2008.