GASNet is a language-independent, low-level networking layer that provides network-independent, high-performance communication primitives tailored for implementing parallel global address space SPMD languages and libraries such as UPC, UPC++, Co-Array Fortran, Legion, Chapel, and many others. The interface is primarily intended as a compilation target and for use by runtime library writers (as opposed to end users), and the primary goals are high performance, interface portability, and expressiveness. GASNet stands for "Global-Address Space Networking".

GASNet is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models on future exascale machines. This paper investigates strategies for efficient implementation of GASNet’s “AM Long” API that couples an RMA (Remote Memory Access) transfer with an Active Message (AM) delivery. We discuss several network-level protocols for AM Long and propose a new target-side reassembly protocol. We present a microbenchmark evaluation on the Cray XC Aries network hardware. The target-side reassembly protocol on this network improves AM Long end-to-end latency by up to 33%, and the effective bandwidth by up to 49%, while also enabling asynchronous source completion that drastically reduces injection overheads. The improved AM Long implementation for Aries is available in GASNet-EX release v2019.9.0 and later.

GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models on future exascale machines. This paper reports on the improvements in performance observed on Cray XC-series systems due to enhancements made to the GASNet-EX software. These enhancements, known as "specializations", primarily consist of replacing network-independent implementations of several recently added features with implementations tailored to the Cray Aries network. Performance gains from specialization include (1) Negotiated-Payload Active Messages improve bandwidth of a ping-pong test by up to 14%, (2) Immediate Operations reduce running time of a synthetic benchmark by up to 93%, (3) non-bulk RMA Put bandwidth is increased by up to 32%, (4) Remote Atomic performance is 70% faster than the reference on a point-to-point test and allows a hot-spot test to scale robustly, and (5) non-contiguous RMA interfaces see up to 8.6x speedups for an intra-node benchmark and 26% for inter-node. These improvements are all available in GASNet-EX version 2018.3.0 and later.

This document is a deliverable for milestone STPM17-6 of the Exascale Computing Project, delivered by WBS 2.3.1.14. It reports on the improvements in performance observed on Cray XC-series systems due to enhancements made to the GASNet-EX software. These enhancements, known as “specializations”, primarily consist of replacing network-independent implementations of several recently added features with implementations tailored to the Cray Aries network. Performance gains from specialization include (1) Negotiated-Payload Active Messages improve bandwidth of a ping-pong test by up to 14%, (2) Immediate Operations reduce running time of a synthetic benchmark by up to 93%, (3) non-bulk RMA Put bandwidth is increased by up to 32%, (4) Remote Atomic performance is 70% faster than the reference on a point-to-point test and allows a hot-spot test to scale robustly, and (5) non-contiguous RMA interfaces see up to 8.6x speedups for an intra-node benchmark and 26% for inter-node. These improvements are available in the GASNet-EX 2018.3.0 release.

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models, typified by such languages as Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Co-Array Fortran, expose one-sided communication as a key building block for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Architectural trends in supercomputing make such programming models increasingly attractive, and newer, more sophisticated models such as UPC++, Legion and Chapel that rely upon similar communication paradigms are gaining popularity. GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models in future exascale machines. The library is an evolution of the popular GASNet communication system, building upon over 15 years of lessons learned. We describe and evaluate several features and enhancements that have been introduced to address the needs of modern client systems. Microbenchmark results demonstrate the RMA performance of GASNet-EX is competitive with several MPI-3 implementations on current HPC systems.

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) Languages are an emerging alternative to MPI for HPC applications development. The GASNet library from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of California at Berkeley provides the network runtime for multiple implemen tations of four PGAS Languages: Unified Parallel C (UPC), Co-Array Fortran (CAF), Titanium and Chapel. GASNet provides a low overhead one-sided communication layer has enabled portability and high performance of PGAS languages. This paper describes our experiences porting GASNet to the Portals network API on the Cray XT series.

Optimized collective operations are a crucial performance factor for many scientific applications. This work investigates the design and optimization of collectives in the context of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages such as Unified Parallel C (UPC). Languages with one-sided communication permit a more flexible and expressive collective interface with application code, in turn enabling more aggressive optimization and more effective utilization of system resources. We investigate the design tradeoffs in a collectives implementation for UPC, ranging from resource management to synchronization mechanisms and target-dependent selection of optimal communication patterns. Our collectives are implemented in the Berkeley UPC compiler using the GASNet communication system, tuned across a wide variety of supercomputing platforms, and benchmarked against MPI collectives. Special emphasis is placed on the newly added Cray XT3 backend for UPC, whose characteristics are benchmarked in detail. © 2006 IEEE.

UPC++ is a C++ library that supports Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. This paper describes a new incarnation that differs substantially from its predecessor, and we discuss the reasons for our design decisions. We also present new features, and show microbenchmark performance numbers demonstrating that one-sided remote memory access (RMA) in UPC++ is competitive with MPI-3 RMA. We also showcase the benefits of UPC++ with irregular applications through a pair of application motifs, including a distributed hash table and a sparse solver component. UPC++'s combination of low-overhead one-sided communication, remote procedure calls, and aggressive asynchrony is the key to delivering high performance with irregular applications and enabling improved programmer productivity.

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. We are revising the library under the auspices of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, to meet the needs of applications requiring PGAS support. UPC++ is intended for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces for moving non-contiguous data and handling memories with different optimal access methods are composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds. The key facilities in UPC++ are global pointers, that enable the programmer to express ownership information for improving locality, one-sided communication, both put/get and RPC, futures and continuations. Futures capture data readiness state, which is useful in making scheduling decisions, and continuations provide for completion handling via callbacks. Together, these enable the programmer to chain together a DAG of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies become satisfied.

UPC++ is a C++ library that supports high-performance computation via an asynchronous communication framework. This paper describes a new incarnation that differs substantially from its predecessor, and we discuss the reasons for our design decisions. We present new design features, including future-based asynchrony management, distributed objects, and generalized Remote Procedure Call (RPC). We show microbenchmark performance results demonstrating that one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) in UPC++ is competitive with MPI-3 RMA; on a Cray XC40 UPC++ delivers up to a 25% improvement in the latency of blocking RMA put, and up to a 33% bandwidth improvement in an RMA throughput test. We showcase the benefits of UPC++ with irregular applications through a pair of application motifs, a distributed hash table and a sparse solver component. Our distributed hash table in UPC++ delivers near-linear weak scaling up to 34816 cores of a Cray XC40. Our UPC++ implementation of the sparse solver component shows robust strong scaling up to 2048 cores, where it outperforms variants communicating using MPI by up to 3.1x. UPC++ encourages the use of aggressive asynchrony in low-overhead RMA and RPC, improving programmer productivity and delivering high performance in irregular applications.