Craig Ulmer

Scientific Workloads on 100GigE Fabrics

2020-11-12 net pub

Joe Kenny has worked hard over the last few years to understand the tradeoffs of building a 100GigE network fabric for cluster computers that can run regular TCP-based applications and HPC applications that use MPI and RDMA. He put a paper together for INDIS at SC this year that ties together some of simulation work he did with Jeremy Wilke and some of the practical experiments we've been doing on real hardware.


Abstract

Priority-based Flow Control (PFC), RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) are three enhancements to Ethernet networks which allow increased performance and may make Ethernet attractive for systems supporting a diverse scientific workload. We constructed a 96-node testbed cluster with a 100 Gb/s Ethernet network configured as a tapered fat tree. Tests representing important network operating conditions were completed and we provide an analysis of these performance results. RoCE running over a PFC-enabled network was found to significantly increase performance for both bandwidth-sensitive and latency-sensitive applications when compared to TCP. Additionally, a case study of interfering applications showed that ETS can prevent starvation of network traffic for latency-sensitive applications running on congested networks. We did not encounter any notable performance limitations for our Ethernet testbed, but we found that practical disadvantages still tip the balance towards traditional HPC networks unless a system design is driven by additional external requirements.

Publication

  • INDIS2020 Paper Joseph P. Kenny, Jeremiah J. Wilke, Craig D. Ulmer, Gavin M. Baker, Samuel Knight, and Jerrold A. Friesen, "An Evaluation of Ethernet Performance for Scientific Workloads". in 2020 IEEE/ACM Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS).

Presentation