People have mentioned that they experience unexpected slow downs in PCIe_gen3 I/O when the pages map to a socket different from the one the HCA connects to. It is speculated that the inter-socket QPI is not provisioned to transfer more than 1GiB/sec for PCIe_gen 3 traffic. This situation may not be in effect on all SandyBrige or IvyBridge systems.
Have you measured anything like this on you systems as well? That would require using physical memory mapped to the socket w/o HCA exclusively for MPI messaging. Mike On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Jeff Squyres (jsquyres) <jsquy...@cisco.com > wrote: > On Jul 8, 2013, at 11:35 AM, Michael Thomadakis <drmichaelt7...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > The issue is that when you read or write PCIe_gen 3 dat to a non-local > NUMA memory, SandyBridge will use the inter-socket QPIs to get this data > across to the other socket. I think there is considerable limitation in > PCIe I/O traffic data going over the inter-socket QPI. One way to get > around this is for reads to buffer all data into memory space local to the > same socket and then transfer them by code across to the other socket's > physical memory. For writes the same approach can be used with intermediary > process copying data. > > Sure, you'll cause congestion across the QPI network when you do non-local > PCI reads/writes. That's a given. > > But I'm not aware of a hardware limitation on PCI-requested traffic across > QPI (I could be wrong, of course -- I'm a software guy, not a hardware > guy). A simple test would be to bind an MPI process to a far NUMA node and > run a simple MPI bandwidth test and see if to get better/same/worse > bandwidth compared to binding an MPI process on a near NUMA socket. > > But in terms of doing intermediate (pipelined) reads/writes to local NUMA > memory before reading/writing to PCI, no, Open MPI does not do this. > Unless there is a PCI-QPI bandwidth constraint that we're unaware of, I'm > not sure why you would do this -- it would likely add considerable > complexity to the code and it would definitely lead to higher overall MPI > latency. > > Don't forget that the MPI paradigm is for the application to provide the > send/receive buffer. Meaning: MPI doesn't (always) control where the > buffer is located (particularly for large messages). > > > I was wondering if OpenMPI does anything special memory mapping to work > around this. > > Just what I mentioned in the prior email. > > > And if with Ivy Bridge (or Haswell) he situation has improved. > > Open MPI doesn't treat these chips any different. > > -- > Jeff Squyres > jsquy...@cisco.com > For corporate legal information go to: > http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/ > > > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list > us...@open-mpi.org > http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/users >
