In this video from the MVAPICH User Group, Nicholas Brown from EPCC presents: ARMing up with MVAPICH, a performance comparison of different MPI implementations on an ARM HPC system.
With a variety of new hardware technologies becoming available for HPC it is an exciting time at the moment for our community. One, potentially very important, future player in the HPC space will be ARM and there are already a number of ARM CPU based HPC system already available. In this talk I will describe work we have done in exploring the performance properties of MVAPICH, OpenMPI and MPT on one of these systems, Fulhame, which is an HPE Apollo 70-based system with 64 nodes of Cavium ThunderX2 ARM processors and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect. In order to take advantage of these systems most effectively, it is very important to understand the performance that different MPI implementations can provide and any further opportunities to optimize these. Therefore, starting with the OSU benchmarks I will explore the different performance properties of these technologies on Fulhame and other systems for comparison, before then moving onto a number of more substantial applications.
Dr Nick Brown is a Research Fellow at EPCC, the University of Edinburgh, with research interests in parallel programming language design, compilers and runtimes. He has worked on a number of large scale parallel codes including developing MONC, an atmospheric model used by the UK climate & weather communities which involves novel in-situ data analytics. He is also interested in micro-core architectures developing ePython, a very small memory footprint Python interpreter with parallel extensions, for many core, low memory chips. Nick is a course organiser on EPCC’s MSc in HPC, as well as supervising MSc and PhD students.