Efficient Implementation of MPI-2 Passive One-Sided Communication on InfiniBand Clusters

In this paper we compare various design alternatives for synchronization in MPI-2 passive one-sided communication on InfiniBand clusters. We discuss several requirements for synchronization in passive one-sided communication. Based on these requirements, we present four design alternatives, which can be classified into two categories: thread-based and atomic operation-based. In thread-based designs, synchronization is achieved with the help of extra threads. In atomic operation-based designs, we exploit InfiniBand atomic operations such as Compare-and-Swap and Fetch-and-Add. Our performance evaluation results show that the atomic operation-based design can require less synchronization overhead, achieve better concurrency, and consume fewer computing resources compared with the thread based design.