Scalable Hardware-Based Multicast Trees

This paper presents an algorithm for implementing optimal hardware-based multicast trees, on networks that provide hardware support for collective communication. Although the proposed methodology can be generalized to a wide class of networks, we apply our methodology to the Quadrics network, a state-of-the-art network that provides hardware-based multicast communication. The proposed mechanism is intended to improve the performance of the collective communication patterns on the network, in those cases where the hardware support can not be directly used, for instance, due to some faulty nodes. This scheme provides significant reduction on multicast latencies compared to the original system primitives, which use multicast trees based on unicast communication. A backtracking algorithm to find the optimal solution to the problem is presented. In addition, a greedy algorithm is presented and shown to provide near optimal solutions. Finally, our experimental results show the good performance and scalability of the proposed multicast tree in comparison to the traditional unicast-based multicast trees. Our multicast mechanism doubles barrier synchronization and broadcasts performance when compared to the production-level MPI library.