Performance Evaluation and Optimization of a Message-Passing Library on the SCC

Background

The Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) experimental processor is a 48-core concept vehicle created by Intel Labs as a platform for Many-core software research. The 48 cores are arranged in a 6x4 on-die mesh of tiles with two cores per tile. The SCC chip possesses four on-die memory controllers for addressing the external main memory. Additionally, each tile possesses a small amount of fast on-die memory that is also accessible to all other cores in a shared-memory manner. These special memory regions are the so-called Message-Passing Buffers (MPBs) of the SCC.

The SCC can be configured to run one self-contained Linux instance per core, including support for TCP/IP connections between the cores. Therefore, the usage of the common Berkeley Socket API is an obvious approach for implementing message-passing on the SCC. However, the TCP/IP driver of the Linux SCC platform does not make use of the fast on-die MPBs but rather utilizes the slower off-die shared-memory for the core-to-core communication. For this reason, the Chair for Operating Systems has implemented an SCC-customized message-passing library that makes use of the fast on-die MPBs and that is compliant to the prevalent Message-Passing Interface Standard (MPI).

The main goal of this Bachelor thesis is to evaluate the performance of this message-passing library and to further optimize it with respect to the SCC's communication infrastructure.

Assignment

• Analysis of the SCC's low-latency communication facilities
• Performance evaluation of the SCC-customized MPI library
• Implementation comparison with other communication libraries
• Optimization of communication primitives like collective operations

We offer

• Comfortable working environment
• A good equipped computer infrastructure
• Access to an Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer
• Personal and engaged supervision

Profile of requirements

• Prerequisites for starting a Bachelor's thesis
• Good programming skills in C/C++
• Competence to work autonomous and creative

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