Exploring DataVortex Systems for Irregular Applications
Emerging applications for data analytics and knowledge discovery typically have irregular or unpredictable communication patterns that do not scale well on parallel systems designed for traditional bulk-synchronous HPC applications. New network architectures that focus on minimizing (short) message latencies, rather than maximizing (large) transfer bandwidths, are emerging as possible alternatives to better support those applications with irregular communication patterns. We explore a system based upon one such novel network architecture, the Data Vortex interconnection network, and examine how this system performs by running benchmark code written for the Data Vortex network, as well as a reference MPI-over- Infiniband implementation, on the same cluster.