View article

Collective communication is of great importance in MPI because the execution time of an MPI program is affected by the communication performance it can gain. Particularly these days, when a cluster system composed of multiple computing nodes has become dominant as a large-scale computing system, the execution time of collective communication affects the total execution time of the MPI program. However, in many implementations of MPI, collective communication is developed to make use of unicast-based communication in a repeated and combined way, which may result in inefficient communication. In this paper, we explore the use of a Software-Defined Network, which was originally expected to help network administrators operate networks through central control in a software-programming manner, to accelerate MPI_Bcast, a basic collective communication used in MPI. The evaluation in this paper …