Photon: Remote Memory Access Middleware for High-Performance Runtime Systems

Abstract

We introduce the Photon RDMA middleware library that enables consistent remote memory access semantics over a number of network interconnect technologies. A primary goal of Photon is to expose a lightweight and flexible network abstraction that minimizes communication and message handling overheads for high-performance applications and runtime systems, in particular those that require the manipulation of objects within a global address space. Both one-sided and rendezvous communication models are supported and asynchronous network progress is exposed at a fine granularity. Photon implements a novel communication pattern called put-with-completion (PWC) that optimizes a completion notification path with variable size data for realizing active message-driven computation. The results of our performance evaluation show that our PWC model is comparable, and often improves upon, existing one-sided RDMA libraries in message latency and throughput metrics.