Toward message passing for a million processes: characterizing MPI on a massive scale blue gene/P

Upcoming exascale capable systems are expected to comprise more than a million processing elements. As researchers continue to work toward architecting these systems, it is becoming increasingly clear that these systems will utilize a significant amount of shared hardware between processing units; this includes shared caches, memory and network components. Thus, understanding how effective current message passing and communication infrastructure is in tying these processing elements together, is critical to making educated guesses on what we can expect from such future machines. Thus, in this paper, we characterize the communication performance of the message passing interface (MPI) implementation on 32 racks (131072 cores) of the largest Blue Gene/P (BG/P) system in the United States (80% of the total system size) and reveal various interesting insights into it.