LCI: A Lightweight Communication Interface for HPC

Marc Snir, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Seminar

CT

Argonne National Laboratory
Building 240/Room 4301
Host Pavan Balaji and Min Si
Event Sponsor Mathmatics and Computer Science Division Seminar

The talk will present the design of LCI and early results from its current implementation.

LCI is a communication library being developed at University of Illinois with the following goals:

(*) Match the needs of new, very irregular applications, such as graph analytics, and of dataflow-oriented languages, such as Legion or PaRSEC.

(*) Focus on the needs of library and frameworks developers, rather than end-users.

(*) Support heavy multithreading with little loss of performance.

(*) Reduce end-to-end communication overheads by improving interaction with other run-time components, such as task scheduler and memory manager.

(*) Facilitate offloading of communication to smart NICs.

Bio: Marc Snir is a retired, Michael Faiman Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He was Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory from 2011 to 2016 and head of the Computer Science Department at Illinois from 2001 to 2007. Until 2001 he was a senior manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center where he led the Scalable Parallel Systems research group that was responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system and to the IBM Blue Gene system.

Marc Snir received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979, worked at NYU on the NYU Ultracomputer project in 1980-1982, and was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982-1986, before joining IBM. Marc Snir was a major contributor to the design of the Message Passing Interface. He has published numerous papers and given many presentations on computational complexity, parallel algorithms, parallel architectures, interconnection networks, parallel languages and libraries and parallel programming environments. Marc is AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.  He has Erdos number 2 and is a mathematical descendant of Jacques Salomon Hadamard. He won the IEEE Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing and the IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award.  He was recently awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree from ENS, Lyon, France.

Miscellaneous Information: 

This Seminar will be streamed. See details at https://anlpress.cels.anl.gov/cels-seminars/

Please click here [schedule.ics] to add this event to your calendar.