Design and implementation of communication system of the Dawning 6000 supercomputer

Abstract

An increasing number of supercomputers adopt a heterogeneous architecture, consisting of both general purpose CPUs and specialized accelerators. Such design is beneficial for scalability and power, but on the other hand, heterogeneity brings new challenges in communication systems to connect heterogeneous components and provide support for programming. The communication system of the Dawning 6000 connects two kinds of heterogeneous processors, Loongson and AMD, and adopts a three layer architecture with an intra-node layer between heterogeneous components. To efficiently connect heterogeneous components, the system forms a global address space and provides a mechanism for message transmission via an in-node global store; and employing Infiniband network, provides an OS-bypassing virtualization method to share an Infiniband card between nodes. To facilitate programming on heterogeneous processors, it supports unified parallel C (UPC), with a modified complier based on global address space. Also, a special collective network is implemented for collective operations. Results obtained from a prototype system prove these features to be both feasible and efficient.

Keywords

hyper parallel processing (HPP) / global address space (GAS) / virtualization / Dawning 6000 / unified parallel C (UPC)