Heuristic-Based Techniques for Mapping Irregular Communication Graphs to Mesh Topologies

Mapping of parallel applications on the network topology is becoming increasingly important on large supercomputers. Topology aware mapping can reduce the hops traveled by messages on the network and hence reduce contention, which can lead to improved performance. This paper discusses heuristic techniques for mapping applications with irregular communication graphs to mesh and torus topologies. Parallel codes with irregular communication constitute an important class of applications. Unstructured grid applications are a classic example of codes with irregular communication patterns. Since the mapping problem is NP-hard, this paper presents fast heuristic-based algorithms. These heuristics are part of a larger framework for automatic mapping of parallel applications. We evaluate the heuristics in this paper in terms of the reduction in average hops per byte. The heuristics discussed here are applicable to most parallel applications since irregular graphs constitute the most general category of communication patterns. Some heuristics can also be easily extended to other network topologies.