MPI+Threads: Thread-Safety Optimization Perspectives

Speaker: Abdelhalim Amer (ANL)
Date: Thursday, 3 December 2015, 08:30-10:00
Session: Programming Models I
Talk type: Project talk (30 min)

Abstract: Most MPI runtimes rely on coarse-grained Pthread mutex-based critical sections to satisfy the thread-safety requirements of the MPI standard. Unfortunately, this approach hinders the scalability of applications that rely heavily on multithreaded communication. This talk presents our latest advances in improving multitheading support in MPI runtimes. We introduce the different aspects we are considering in our optimization space including, lock management from an arbitration and latency perspectives, granularity, and exploring alternative threading models such as lightweight threads. In addition, we will present our latest lock management improvements to MPICH and the MPICH+Argobots prototype.