Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters

To be held in Conjunction with
Int'l Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS '02)
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, April 15, 2002

• Tentative Advance Program:  (html)
• Registration and Hotel Information
• Call For Papers:   (html)     (postscript)     (pdf)
• Previous Workshop
  • CAC '01
• Additional Information

April 15 (Monday)

8:00 -  8:15 Welcome and Workshop Introduction

8:15 -  9:15 Keynote Talk

Anthony Skjellum, Mississippi State University and MPI SoftTech
Title: Explicit Parallel Programming with `Message Passing Interfaces': Legacy, Longevity, Optimizability, Evolvability

9:15 -  10:30 Session I

Routing and Switching
Session Chair: Scott Pakin, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Each presentation is for 20 minutes. The last 15 minutes of the session is for discussion.

• Layered Shortest Path (LASH) Routing in Irregular System Area Networks, Tor Skeie, Olav Lysne, and Ingerbjorg Theiss (Simula Research Laboratory, Norway)

• Evaluation of Alternative Arbitration Policies for Myrinet Switches, P.J. Garcia, M.D. Mora, F.J. Alfaro, J.L. Sanchez, and J. Flich (University of Castilla-La Mancha and University Politecnica of Valencia, Spain)

• Investigating Switch Scheduling Algorithms to Support QoS in the Multimedia Router (MMR), B. Caminero, C. Carri'on, F.J. Quiles, J. Duato, and S. Yalamanchili (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain University Politecnica of Valencia, Spain and Georgia Tech.)

10:30 -  11:00 Break

11:00 -  12:15 Session II

Remote Memory Communication
Session Chair: Fabrizio Petrini, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Each presentation is for 20 minutes. The last 15 minutes of the session is for discussion.

• Exploiting Transparent Remote Memory Access for Non-Contiguous- and One-Sided-Communication, Joachim Worringen, Andreas Gäer, Frank Reker and Thomas Bemmerl (RWTH Aachen, Germany)

• Protocols and Strategies for Optimizing Remote Memory Operations on Clusters, Jarek Nieplocha, V. Tipparaju, A. Saify, and D. K. Panda (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Ohio State University)

• Portals 3.0: Protocol Building Blocks for Low Overhead Communication, Ron Brightwell, Bill Lawry, Arthur B. Maccabe, Rolf Riesen (Sandia National Laboratory and Univ. of New Mexico)

12:15 -  1:45 Lunch (On your own)

 1:45 -  3:00 Session III

I/O and NIC Support
Session Chair: Jarek Nieplocha, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Each presentation is for 20 minutes. The last 15 minutes of the session is for discussion.

• Performance Evaluation of I/O Traffic and Placement of I/O Nodes on a High Performance Network, Salvador Coll, Fabrizio Petrini, Eitan Frachtenberg and Adolfy Hoisie (Los Alamos National Laboratory and University Politecnica of Valencia, Spain)

• MPI/IO on DAFS Over VIA: Implementation and Performance Evaluation, Jiesheng Wu and D, K. Panda (Ohio State University)

• Enhancing the Performance of Tiled Loop Execution onto Clusters using Memory Mapped Network Interfaces and Pipelined Schedules, A. Sotiropoulos, G. Tsoukalas and N. Koziris (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)

3:00 - 3:30 Break

3:30 - 4:20 Session IV

InfiniBand
Session Chair: Olav Lysne, Univ. of Oslo, Norway

Each presentation is for 20 minutes. The last 10 minutes of the session is for discussion.

• Analyzing the Influence of Virtual Lanes on the Performance of InfiniBand Networks, J.C. Sancho, J. Flich, A. Robles, P.Lopez, and J. Duato (University Politecnica of Valencia, Spain)

• A Strategy to Manage Time Sensitive Traffic in InfiniBand, Francisco J. Alfaro, Jose L. Sanchez and J. Duato (University Politecnica of Valencia, Spain)

 4:20 -  4:30 Short Break

 4:30 -  6:00 Panel Session

Title: Cluster Interconnects Crystal Ball: which will win in 2006?

Description: The architectures and technologies used for cluster interconnection are in continual flux. Recently a number of emerging technologies have begun vying for a spot at the cluster interconnect feast. Infiniband specifies new technology at many transport levels, including a new user interface. The advantages of SCSI and Ethernet are being combined in the iSCSI protocol. Optics has begun to play a role in clusters. The latencies of some interconnects are getting low enough to consider support of NUMA traffic.

Today's gigabit and multi-gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel solutions give these technologies an evolutionary advantage over game-changing interconnects. Within the server, PCI-X and 3GIO are the anointed heirs to PCI. On the high end, proprietary interconnects such as Myrinet, GigaNet, and Quadrics are often employed, especially for supercomputer clusters.

Given this current plethora of cluster interconnects, what technologies---or combinations of such interconnects---are likely to be used in clusters in the 2006 time frame? And why? If you wish, you may create separate crystal-ball readings for low-end, mid-range, high-end, and supercomputer clusters. Or you may categorize your predictions according to other market delimiters, for instance based upon application.

Moderator: Craig Stunkel, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Panelists:

David Addison, Quadrics
Kevin Deierling, Mellanox
Patrick Geoffray, Myricom
Shubu Mukherjee, Intel
Renato J. Recio, IBM

 6:00 - Adjourn

Deadline for advance registration is March 25, 2002.

THEME:

A large number of research groups from academia, industry, and research labs are currently engaged in the above research directions. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the areas of communication and architecture to discuss state-of-the-art solutions as well as future trends for designing scalable, high-performance, and cost-effective communication architectures for clusters.

The first workshop in this series (CAC '01) was held in conjunction with IPDPS '01 conference and it was very successful. CAC '02 workshop plans to continue the tradition of CAC '01.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

1. Router/switch, network, and network-interface architecture for supporting efficient point-to-point and collective communication at intra-cluster and inter-cluster levels.
   
2. Design, development, and implementation of user-level communication protocols (GM, VIA, etc) on different networking and interconnect technologies (such as Myrinet, Gigabit Ethernet, ATM, Infiniband, etc.).
3. High-performance implementation of different programming layers (Message Passing Interface (MPI), Distributed Shared Memory such as TreadMarks, Get/Put, Global Arrays, sockets, etc.).
   
4. Communication and architectural issues related to flow control, management of communication resources, deadlock-handling, reliability, and QoS.
   

PROCEEDINGS:

PAPER SUBMISSIONS:

SCHEDULE:

  
Title and Abstract:         October 29, 2001 
Full Paper submission:      Nov. 5, 2001 
Notification of acceptance: December 10, 2001 
Camera-ready due:           January 21, 2002 

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS:

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

• Bulent Abali (IBM TJ Watson)
• Mohammad Banikazemi (IBM TJ Watson)
• Alan Benner (IBM)
• Ron Brightwell (Sandia National Lab)
• Shuki Bruck (Caltech)
• Alan Cox (Rice)
• Tony Cortes (UPC, Spain)
• Sandhya Dwarkadas (Rochester)
• Wu-Chun Feng (Los Alamos National Lab)
• Mike Foster (DARPA)
• Jose Manuel Garcia (UPV, Spain)
• Vijay Karamcheti (New York Univ.)
• Mario Lauria (Ohio State)
• Olav Lysne (Univ. of Oslo, Norway)
• Jarek Nieplocha (Pacific Northwest National Lab)
• Scott Pakin (Los Alamos National Lab)
• Fabrizio Petrini (Los Alamos National Lab)
• Greg Pfister (IBM)
• Timothy Pinkston (Univ. of Southern California)
• Antonio Robles (UPV, Spain)
• Tom Rokicki (Instantis)
• Reza Rooholamini (Dell)
• Hemal Shah (Intel)
• Anand Sivasubramaniam (Penn State)
• Anthony Skjellum (Mississippi State)
• Pete Wyckoff (Ohio Supercomputer Center)