Effects of packet pacing for MPI programs in a Grid environment

Improving the performance of TCP communication is the key to the successful deployment of MPI programs in a Grid environment in which multiple clusters are connected through high performance dedicated networks. To efficiently utilize the inter-cluster bandwidth, a traffic control mechanism is required so as not to allow the aggregate transmission bandwidth to exceed the inter-cluster bandwidth when multiple nodes communicate at one time. In this paper, we propose a traffic control method for MPI programs, in which an application or the MPI runtime controls the transmission rate based on the communication pattern by using certain MPI attributes. Packet pacing is used at each node preventing microscopic burst transmission to thus avoid congestion. We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by experiments using a 10 Gbps emulated WAN environment. We show most of the NAS Parallel benchmarks improve the performance, since the proposed method reduces packet losses due to traffic congestion on the inter-cluster network. The results have indicated that it is feasible to connect multiple clusters and run large-scale scientific applications over distances up to 1000 kilometers, if an appropriate network is available.