HPPNET: A novel network for HPC and its implication for communication software

With the widespread adoption of multicore processors in high performance computing (HPC) environment, the balance between computation and communication moves towards computation. It has been becoming more important to design a high efficient network for HPC system, which commonly has two challengers associated: 1) To provide a communication environment with low latency, high bandwidth, and high small message processing rate; 2) and to efficiently support the partitioned global address space (PGAS) programming model. With respects to these needs this paper proposes a novel network named HPPNET. By adopting HyperTransport interface, separate channel design, on-load part of processing work to host, and transparent direct load/store in global physical address space, HPPNET can sufficiently support both needs for HPC. Meanwhile, we have adopted several key technologies to minimize the implication of new network for communication software. Evaluation shows that HPPNET hardware design can achieve high performance and bring no barrier to high efficiency software design. Our results also show that the 8 bytes remote store cost 0.4s in HPPNET prototype.