Towards Efficient Oversubscription: On the Cost and Benefit of Event-Based Communication in MPI

Contemporary HPC systems use batch scheduling of compute jobs running on exclusively assigned hardware resources. During communication, polling for progress is the state of the art as it promises minimal latency. Previous work on oversubscription and event-based communication, i.e. vacating the CPU while waiting for communication to finish, shows that these techniques can improve the overall system utilisation and reduce the energy consumption. Despite these findings, neither of the two techniques is commonly used in HPC systems today. We believe that the current lack of detailed studies of the low-level effects of event-based communication, a key enabler of efficient oversubscription for classical MPI-based applications, is a major obstacle to a wider adoption. We demonstrate that the sched_yield system call, which is often used for oversubscription scenarios, is not best suited for this purpose on modern Linux systems. Furthermore, we incorporate event-based communication into Open MPI and evaluate the effects on latency and energy consumption using an MPI micro-benchmark. Our results indicate that event-base communication incurs significant latency overhead but also saves energy. Both effects grow with the imbalance of the application using MPI.