MPI Sessions: Leveraging Runtime Infrastructure to Increase Scalability of Applications at Exascale

Abstract

MPI includes all processes in MPI_COMM_WORLD; this is untenable for reasons of scale, resiliency, and overhead. This paper offers a new approach, extending MPI with a new concept called Sessions, which makes two key contributions: a tighter integration with the underlying runtime system; and a scalable route to communication groups. This is a fundamental change in how we organise and address MPI processes that removes well-known scalability barriers by no longer requiring the global communicator MPI_COMM_WORLD.