Towards an Efficient Process Placement Policy for MPI Applications in Multicore Environments

This paper presents a method to efficiently place MPI processes on multicore machines. Since MPI implementations often feature efficient supports for both shared-memory and network communication, an adequate placement policy is a crucial step to improve applications performance. As a case study, we show the results obtained for several NAS computing kernels and explain how the policy influences overall performance. In particular, we found out that a policy merely increasing the intranode communication ratio is not enough and that cache utilization is also an influential factor. A more sophisticated policy (eg. one taking into account the architecture’s memory structure) is required to observe performance improvements.