Experiences of applying one-sided communication to nearest-neighbor communication

© 2016 IEEE.Nearest-neighbor communication is one of the most important communication patterns appearing in many scientific applications. In this paper, we discuss the results of applying UPC++, a library-based partitioned global address space (PGAS) programming extension to C++, to an adaptive mesh framework (BoxLib), and a full scientific application GTC-P, whose communications are dominated by the nearest-neighbor communication. The results on a Cray XC40 system show that compared with the highly-tuned MPI two-sided implementations, UPC++ improves the communication performance up to 60% and 90% for BoxLib and GTC-P, respectively. We also implement the nearest-neighbor communication using MPI one-sided messages. The performance comparison demonstrates that the MPI one-sided implementation can also improve the communication performance over the two-sided version but not so significantly as UPC++ does.