Designing a ROCm-Aware MPI Library for AMD GPUs: Early Experiences

Abstract

Due to the emergence of AMD GPUs and their adoption in upcoming exascale systems (e.g. Frontier), it is pertinent to have scientific applications and communication middlewares ported and optimized for these systems. Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) platform is an open-source suite of libraries tailored towards writing high-performance software for AMD GPUs. GPU-aware MPI, has been the de-facto standard for accelerating HPC applications on GPU clusters. The state-of-the-art GPU-aware MPI libraries have evolved over the years to support NVIDIA CUDA platforms. Due to the recent emergence of AMD GPUs, it is equally important to add support for AMD ROCm platforms. Existing MPI libraries do not have native support for ROCm-aware communication. In this paper, we take up the challenge of designing a ROCm-aware MPI runtime within the MVAPICH2-GDR library. We design an abstract communication layer to interface with CUDA and ROCm runtimes. We exploit hardware features such as PeerDirect, ROCm IPC, and large-BAR mapped memory to orchestrate efficient GPU-based communication. We further augment these mechanisms by designing software-based schemes yielding optimized communication performance. We evaluate the performance of MPI-level point-to-point and collective operations with our proposed ROCm-aware MPI Library and Open MPI with UCX on a cluster of AMD GPUs. We demonstrate 3–6$\times$ and 2$\times$ higher bandwidth for intra- and inter-node communication, respectively. With the rocHPCG application, we demonstrate approximately 2.2$\times$ higher GFLOPs/s. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research work that studies the tradeoffs involved in designing a ROCm-aware MPI library for AMD GPUs.

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This research is supported in part by NSF grants #1818253, #1854828, #1931537, #2007991, #2018627, and XRAC grant #NCR-130002.