MPI tag matching performance on ConnectX and ARM

As we approach Exascale, message matching has increasingly become a significant factor in HPC application performance. To address this, network vendors have placed higher precedence on improving MPI message matching performance. ConnectX-5, Mellanox's new network interface card, has both hardware and software matching layers. The performance characteristics of these layers have yet to be studied under real world circumstances. In this work we offer an initial evaluation of ConnectX-5 message matching performance. To analyze this new hardware we executed a series of micro-benchmarks and applications on Astra, an ARM-based ConnectX-5 HPC system, while varying hardware and software matching parameters. The benchmark results show the ConnectX-5 is sensitive to queue depths, and that hardware message matching increases performance for applications that send messages between 1KiB and 16KiB. Furthermore, the hardware matching system was capable of matching wildcard receives without negatively impacting performance. Finally, for some applications, a significant improvement can be observed when leveraging the ConnectX-5's hardware matching.