Multi-threaded UPC runtime with network endpoints: Design alternatives and evaluation on multi-core architectures

Multi-core architectures are becoming more and more popular in HEC (High End Computing) era. Recent trends of high-productivity computing in conjunction with advanced multi-core and network architectures have increased the interest in Global Address Space (PGAS) languages, due to its high-productivity feature and better applicability. Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an emerging PGAS language. In this paper, we compare different design alternatives for a high-performance and scalable UPC runtime on multi-core nodes, from several aspects: performance, portability, interoperability and support for irregular parallelism. Based on our analysis, we present a novel design of a multi-threaded UPC runtime that supports multi-endpoints. Our runtime is able to dramatically decrease network access contention resulting in 80% lower latency for fine-grained memget/memput operations and almost doubling the bandwidth for medium size messages, compared to multi-threaded Berkeley UPC Runtime. Furthermore, the multi-endpoint design opens up new doors for runtime optimizations — such as support for irregular parallelism. We utilize true network helper threads and load-balancing via work stealing in the runtime. Our evaluation with novel benchmarks shows that our runtime can achieve 90% of the peak efficiency, which is a factor of 1.3 times better than existing Berkeley UPC Runtime. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in which multi-network endpoint capable UPC runtime design is proposed for modern multi-core systems.