Optimization Strategies for MPI-Interoperable Active Messages

Data-intensive applications, such as those in bioinformatics and social network analysis, differ from traditional scientific applications in that they often involve data-driven and irregular computation/communication patterns, making them ill-suited for traditional data movement approaches. Active Messages (AM) is an alternative programming model that allows dynamically moving computation closer to data, rather than moving the data to the local process. In our previous work, we proposed an MPI-interoperable AM framework that allows existing MPI applications to incrementally take advantage of AM capabilities. While that work presented a baseline implementation of how AMs semantically interact with the rest of the MPI infrastructure, it had several performance shortcomings. In this paper, we analyze these performance shortcomings and propose three optimization strategies: one implicitly derived by the MPI implementation and two explicitly hinted to by the application user. In addition to the detailed description of these optimization strategies, the paper presents a thorough performance evaluation on a 4096-core cluster that demonstrates considerable performance advantages from these strategies.