LCI
Lightweight Communication Interface (LCI)

Implementation of a cool communication layer.

Authors

Overview

The Lightweight Communication Interface (LCI) is designed to be an efficient communication library for multithreaded, irregular communications. It is a research tool to explore design choices for such libraries. It has the following major features:

  • Multithreaded performance as the first priority: No big blocking locks like those in MPI! We carefully design the internal data structures to minimize interference between threads. We use atomic operations and fine-grained try locks extensively instead of coarse-grained blocking locks. The posting sends/receives, polling completions, and making progress on the progress engine (LCI_progress) use different locks or no locks at all! Threads would not interfere with each other unless necessary.

  • Versatile communication interface: LCI provides users with various options including:

    • Communication primitives: two-sided send/recv, one-sided put/get.
    • Completion mechanisms: synchronizers (similar to MPI requests/futures), completion queues, function handlers.
    • Protocols: small/medium/long messages mapping to eager/rendezvous protocol.
    • Communication buffers: for both source/target buffers, we can use user-provided/runtime-allocated buffers.
    • Registration: for long messages, users can explicitly register the buffer or leave it to runtime (just use LCI_SEGMENT_ALL).

    The options are orthogonal and almost all combinations are valid! For example, the example code putla_queue uses one-sided put + user-provided source buffer + runtime-allocated target buffer + rendezvous protocol + completion queue on source/targer side + explicit registration.

  • Explicit control of communication behaviors and resources: versatile communication interface has already given users a lot of control. Besides, users can control various low-level features through API/environmental variables/cmake variables such as

    • Replication of communication devices.
    • The semantics of send/receive tag matching.
    • All communication primitives are non-blocking and users can decide when to retry in case of temporarily unavailable resources.
    • LCI also gives users an explicit function (LCI_progress) to make progress on the communication engine.
    • Different implementation and size of completion queues/matching tables.

    Users can tailor the LCI configuration to reduce software overheads, or just use default settings if LCI is not a performance bottleneck.

Currently, LCI is implemented as a mix of C and C++ libraries. Lightweight Communication Tools (LCT) is a C++ library providing basic tools that can be used across libraries. Lightweight Communication Interface (LCI) is a C library implementing communication-related features.

Currently, the functionalities in the LCT library include:

  • timing.
  • string searching and manipulation.
  • query thread ID and number.
  • logging.
  • performance counters.
  • different implementation of queues.
  • PMI (Process Management Interface) wrappers.

The actual API and (some) documentation are located in lct.h and lci.h.

Installation

cmake .
make
make install

Important CMake variables

  • CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install: Where to install LCI
    • This is the same across all the cmake projects.
  • LCI_DEBUG=ON/OFF: Enable/disable the debug mode (more assertions and logs). The default value is OFF.
  • LCI_SERVER=ibv/ofi/ucx: Hint to which network backend to use. If the backend indicated by this variable are found, LCI will just use it. Otherwise, LCI will use whatever are found with the priority ibv > ofi > ucx. The default value is ibv. Typically, you don't need to modify this variable as if libibverbs presents, it is likely to be the recommended one to use.
    • ibv: libibverbs, typically for infiniband.
    • ofi: libfabrics, for all other networks (slingshot-11, ethernet, shared memory).
    • ucx: UCX. Currently, the backend is in the experimental state.
  • LCI_FORCE_SERVER=ON/OFF: Default value is OFF. If it is set to ON, LCI_SERVER will not be treated as a hint but a requirement.
  • LCI_WITH_LCT_ONLY=ON/OFF: Whether to only build LCT (The Lightweight Communication Tools). Default is OFF (build both LCT and LCI).

Run LCI applications

We use the same mechanisms as MPI to launch LCI processes, so you can use the same way you run MPI applications to run LCI applications. Typically, it would be mpirun or srun. For example,

mpirun -n 2 ./hello_world

or

srun -n 2 ./hello_world

Write an LCI program

See examples and tests for some example code.

See lci/api/lci.h for public APIs.

doxygen for a full documentation.

LICENSE

See LICENSE file.