RCKMPI – Lightweight MPI Implementation for Intel’s Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC)

The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is an experimental processor created by Intel Labs. It is a distributed memory architecture that provides shared memory possibilities and an on die Message Passing Buffer (MPB). This paper presents an MPI implementation (RCKMPI) that uses an efficient mix of MPB and DDR3 shared memory for low level communication. The on die buffer found in the SCC provides higher bandwidth and lower latency than the available shared memory. In spite of this, message passing can be faster through DDR3, due to protocol overheads related to the small size of the MPB and the necessity to split and reassemble large packages, together with the possibility that the data is not available in the cache. These overheads take over after certain message sizes, requiring run time decisions with regards to which type of buffers to use, in order to achieve higher performance. In the current implementation, the decision is based on remaining bytes to transfer from in transit packets. MPI benchmarks are shown to demonstrate that the use of both types of buffers results in equal or lower transmission times than when communicating through the on die buffer alone.