Scalable and high-performance mpi design for very large infiniband clusters

In the past decade, rapid advances have taken place in the field of computer and network design enabling us to connect thousands of computers together to form high-performance clusters. These clusters are used to solve computationally challenging scientific problems. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a popular model to write applications for these clusters. There are a vast array of scientific applications which use MPI on clusters. As the applications operate on larger and more complex data, the size of the compute clusters is scaling higher and higher. Thus, in order to enable the best performance to these scientific applications, it is very critical for the design of the MPI libraries be extremely scalable and high-performance. InfiniBand is a cluster interconnect which is based on open-standards and gaining rapid acceptance. This dissertation presents novel designs based on the new features offered by InfiniBand, in order to design scalable and high-performance MPI libraries for large-scale clusters with tens-of-thousands of nodes. Methods developed in this dissertation have been applied towards reduction in overall resource consumption, increased overlap of computation and communication, improved performance of collective operations and finally designing application-level benchmarks to make efficient use of modern networking technology. Software developed as a part of this dissertation is available in MVAPICH, which is a popular open-source implementation of MPI over InfiniBand and is used by several hundred top computing sites all around the world.