Networking Technologies for High-Performance Computing: Principles and Solutions

Title: Networking Technologies for High-Performance Computing: Principles and Solutions

Speakers: Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda and Hari Subramoni (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University)

Abstract: InfiniBand (IB), High-speed Ethernet (HSE), RoCE, Omni-Path, EFA, Tofu, and Slingshot technologies are generating a lot of excitement towards building next generation High-End Computing (HEC) systems including clusters, datacenters, file systems, storage, cloud computing and Big Data (Hadoop, Spark, HBase and Memcached) environments. This tutorial will provide an overview of these emerging technologies, their offered architectural features, their current market standing, and their suitability for designing HEC systems. It will start with a brief overview of IB, HSE, RoCE, Omni-Path, EFA, Tofu, and Slingshot. In-depth overview of the architectural features of IB, HSE (including iWARP and RoCE), and Omni-Path, their similarities and differences, and the associated protocols will be presented. An overview of the emerging NVLink, NVLink2, NVSwitch, AMD Infinity Fabric, Slingshot, and Tofu architectures will also be given. Next, an overview of the OpenFabrics stack which encapsulates IB, HSE, and RoCE (v1/v2) in a unified manner will be presented. An overview of libfabrics stack will also be provided. Hardware/software solutions and the market trends behind these networking technologies will be highlighted. Sample performance numbers of these technologies and protocols for different environments will be presented. Finally, hands-on exercises will be carried out for the attendees to gain first-hand experience of running experiments with high-performance networks.

Bios:
Dhabaleswar K (DK) Panda is a Professor and University Distinguished Scholar of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. He is serving as the Director of the ICICLE NSF-AI Institute (https://icicle.ai). He has published over 500 papers. The MVAPICH2 MPI libraries, designed and developed by his research group (http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu), are currently being used by more than 3,300 organizations worldwide (in 90 countries). More than 1.69 million downloads of this software have taken place from the project’s site. This software is empowering many clusters in the TOP500 list. High-performance and scalable solutions for Deep Learning frameworks and Machine Learning applications from his group are available from https://hidl.cse.ohio-state.edu. Similarly, scalable and high-performance solutions for Big Data and Data science frameworks are available from https://hibd.cse.ohio-state.edu. Prof. Panda is an IEEE Fellow and recipient of the 2022 IEEE Charles Babbage Award. More details about Prof. Panda are available at http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~panda.

Dr. Hari Subramoni is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. His current research interests include high performance interconnects and protocols, parallel computer architecture, network-based computing, exascale computing, network topology aware computing, QoS, power-aware LAN-WAN communication, fault tolerance, virtualization, big data, deep learning and cloud computing. He has published over 100 papers in international journals and conferences related to these research areas. He has been actively involved in various professional activities in academic journals and conferences. Dr. Subramoni is doing research on the design and development of MVAPICH2 (High Performance MPI over InfiniBand, iWARP and RoCE) and MVAPICH2-X (Hybrid MPI and PGAS (OpenSHMEM, UPC and CAF)) software packages. He is a member of IEEE & ACM.