DISHM: A Zero-Copy Intra-Node Communication Approach in Large Scale Simulation

Simulation generally needs reliable and efficient communication. Most present communication mechanism, e.g. MPI, involves buffer copying, which leads to high cost. In this paper, we propose a zero-copy intra-node message passing approach DISHM which partitions shared memory into segments and each intra-node process uses one segment to receive messages. Each segment consists of two levels of index L1 and L2 that both control the use of space in the host segment, and processes read from and write to shared memory directly, thereby eliminating copying buffers. As experimental results show, DISHM exhibits nearly equivalent performance to MPI for small message and superior performance for large message - DISHM costs less time by 43%, 40% and 55% respectively in pure communication, communication with contention and real simulation within a single node.