Efficient All-to-All Broadcast in Heterogeneous Network of Workstations

Abstract

Due to the commodity nature of workstations and networking equipment, LAN environments are gradually becoming heterogeneous. In this paper, we design efficient all-to-all broadcast algorithms for heterogeneous network of workstations. We propose a framework called Cluster-Agent Framework as the basis for efficient implementations of all-to-all communication for scientific applications in heterogeneous network of workstations. The framework partitions the participating workstations into clusters, with each cluster having a fast node as the agent to perform all-to-all communication for the slower nodes. Based on this framework, we develop two algorithms, Gather-Broadcast and Two-Step Broadcast, for all-to-all broadcast. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate performance advantage of our algorithms compared with the MPICH implementation and a number of existing algorithms.