Advert: An Asynchronous Runtime for Fine-Grained Network Systems

Abstract

The Data Vortex Network is a novel high-radix, congestion free interconnect able to cope with the fine-grained, unpredictable communication patterns of irregular applications. This paper presents ADVERT, an asynchronous runtime system that provides performance and productivity for the Data Vortex Network. ADVERT integrates a lightweight memory manager (DVMem) for the user accessible SRAM integrated in the network interface, and a communication library (DVComm) that implements active messaging primitives (get, put, and remote execution). ADVERT hides the complexity of controlling all the network hardware features through the low-level Data Vortex programming interface, while providing comparable performance. We discuss ADVERT's design and present microbenchmarks to examine different runtime features. ADVERT provides the functionalities for building higher level asynchronous many tasking runtimes and partitioned global address space (PGAS) libraries on top of the Data Vortex Network.