MPI performance engineering with the MPI tool interface: The integration of MVAPICH and TAU

Abstract The desire for high performance on scalable parallel systems is increasing the complexity and tunability of MPI implementations. The MPI Tools Information Interface (MPI_T) introduced as part of the MPI 3.0 standard provides an opportunity for performance tools and external software to introspect and understand MPI runtime behavior at a deeper level to detect scalability issues. The interface also provides a mechanism to fine-tune the performance of the MPI library dynamically at runtime. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure that extends existing components — TAU, MVAPICH2, and BEACON to take advantage of the MPI_T interface and offer runtime introspection, online monitoring, recommendation generation, and autotuning capabilities. We validate our design by developing optimizations for a combination of production and synthetic applications. Using our infrastructure, we implement an autotuning policy for AmberMD (a molecular dynamics package) that monitors and reduces the internal memory footprint of the MVAPICH2 MPI library without affecting performance. For applications such as MiniAMR whose collective communication is latency sensitive, our infrastructure is able to generate recommendations to enable hardware offloading of collectives supported by MVAPICH2. By implementing this recommendation, the MPI time for MiniAMR at 224 processes reduces by 15%.