Locality-Aware Parallel Process Mapping for Multi-Core HPC Systems

Abstract—High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are composed of servers containing an ever-increasing number of cores. With such high processor core counts, non-uniform mem-ory access (NUMA) architectures are almost universally used to reduce inter-processor and memory communication bottlenecks by distributing processors and memory throughout a server-internal networking topology. Application studies have shown that the tuning of processes placement in a server’s NUMA networking topology to the application can have a dramatic impact on performance. The performance implications are mag-nified when running a parallel job across multiple server nodes, especially with large scale HPC applications. This paper presents the Locality-Aware Mapping Algorithm (LAMA) for distributing the individual processes of a parallel application across processing resources in an HPC system, paying particular attention to the internal server NUMA topologies. The algorithm is able to support both homogeneous and het-erogeneous hardware systems, and dynamically adapts to the available hardware and user-specified process layout at run-time. As implemented in Open MPI, the LAMA provides 362,880 mapping permutations and is able to naturally scale out to additional hardware resources as they become available in future architectures