Open Tool for Parameter Optimization (OTPO)

Parallel computing environments continue to grow in complexity, with a myriad of hardware and software components influencing the performance of an application. Open MPI exposes a large number of features of modern architectures through its run-time parameters. These parameters can be passed to the MPI library and influence the behavior of the MPI library without having to recompile the communication library or the application. Popular examples for MCA parameters include:

The cross-over point for point-to-point operations between the eager and the rendezvous protocol
Network specific values such as internal buffer sizes (e.g. socket buffer sizes)
Algorithms to be used for collective operations

The Open Tool for Parameter Optimization (OTPO) is a new framework designed to aid in the optimization of the MCA paremeters. OTPO systematically tests a large numbers of combinations of Open MPI's run-time tunable parameters based on a user input file to determine the best set for a given platform.

Key features of OTPO include:

Support for three different benchmarks for the tuning procedure (Netpipe, skaMPI, NAS Parallel Benchmarks).
Easy interface to add support for other benchmarks
Support for various tuning algorithms
Ability to use the result of an optimization run as the input for a new optimization
Ability to interrupt an optimization run and resume it later on

Open MPI is an Associated Project
of the Software in the Public Interest non-profit organization