RDMA and MPI for High-Performance Computing
Make MPI fast on RDMA fabrics: libfabric, collectives, RMA, memory registration and GPU-aware communication.
Advanced30 lessons
written lessons≈ 15 h
High-Performance Networking & Cloud-Native · 30 illustrated lessons (text/HTML)
Outcomes
- Explain how MPI maps onto RDMA and OFI/libfabric
- Tune collectives and communication-computation overlap
- Deploy and profile MPI applications on InfiniBand and RoCE
Where we teach this
The lessons
Every lesson in this curriculum, in the order we teach it.
- 1Course introduction
- 2HPC fundamentals
- 3RDMA technical principles
- 4InfiniBand architecture explained
- 5RoCE and iWARP explained
- 6Overview of the MPI standard
- 7MPI implementations and the layers beneath them
- 8Architecture explained
- 9Open MPI OOB and BTL
- 10MPICH CH4 and netmod explained
- 11The OFI (libfabric) interface: architecture and core concepts
- 12The UCX communication framework
- 13RDMA communication primitives
- 14RDMA optimisation of MPI point-to-point communication
- 15RDMA optimisation of MPI collective communication
- 16MPI RMA and RDMA integration explained
- 17Memory registration and pinning: RDMA registration principles, pinning overhead and registration caching
- 18Queue pair (QP) management
- 19Completion queues (CQ) and event handling
- 20Overlapping communication and computation
- 21Performance tuning basics
- 22Tuning MPI runtime parameters
- 23Network hardware tuning: key settings for HPC
- 24Optimising large-scale job startup
- 25Fault tolerance and resilience: RDMA link-failure detection, MPI error handling, checkpoint/restart with RDMA
- 26Heterogeneous computing and RDMA: GPUDirect RDMA and MPI integration
- 27Advanced communication patterns: RDMA support for persistent, partitioned and neighbourhood-collective MPI
- 28Case study 1: cluster deployment and configuration with Open MPI and UCX
- 29Case study 2: performance analysis and tuning of an application with MPICH and OFI
- 30Outlook: smart NICs and the future of communication libraries
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