LPF

The LPF communication backend is implementing the in-house version of Infiniband-based communication. The goal of the LPF backend is to provide a viable and performant alternative to the MPI backend. We rely on the LPF software for the Infiniband support, provided via the IB Verbs API.

Infiniband networks (specifically with ConnectX-* generation adapters) provide hardware features which can be utilized via HiCR, such as:

• polling on a local adapter via ibv_poll_cq for the reception of messages. This allows e.g. to avoid remote communication when ensuring certain communication has completed.

• Infiniband provides support for extended atomics, such as atomic Compare&Swap operations on a remote memory address. This allows HiCR to implement a hardware supported global mutex.

The following management functionalities are implemented:

• Memory: expose LPF memory allocation capabilities

• Communication: enable data movements among different instances using Infiniband

API reference available: Doxygen

Checkout which version is required: Software Requirements

Note

Examples: Memcpy: Distributed, Object Store: Publish Read, Topology: Distributed, Channels