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GTC Silicon Valley-2019 ID:S9677:NVSHMEM: A PGAS Library for GPU Clusters

Anshuman Goswami(NVIDIA),Sreeram Potluri(NVIDIA)
We'll discuss NVSHMEM, a PGAS library that implements the OpenSHMEM specification for communication across NVIDIA GPUs connected by different types of interconnects that include PCI-E, NVLink and Infiniband. NVSHMEM makes it possible to initiate communication from within a CUDA kernel. As a result, CUDA kernel boundaries are not forced on an application due to its communication requirements. Less synchronization on the CPU helps strong scaling efficiency. Ability to initiate fine-grained communication from inside the CUDA kernel helps achieve better overlap of communication with computation. QUDA is a popular GPU-Enabled QCD library used by several popular packages like Chroma and MILC. NVSHMEM enables better strong scaling in QUDA. NVSHMEM not only benefits latency-bound applications like QUDA, but can also help improve performance and reduce complexity of codes like FFT that are bandwidth bound and codes like Breadth First Search that have a dynamic communication pattern.

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