Using DCT-based Approximate Communication to Improve MPI Performance in Parallel Clusters

Communication overheads in distributed systems constitute a large fraction of the total execution time, and limit the scalability of applications running on these systems. We propose a DCT-based approximate communication scheme that takes advantage of the error resiliency of several widely-used applications, and improves communication efficiency by substantially reducing message lengths. Our scheme is implemented into the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. When evaluated on several representative MPI applications on a real cluster system, it is seen that the fraction of total execution time devoted to communication reduces from 59% to 23%, even accounting for the computational overhead required for DCT encoding. For many communication-intensive applications, it is shown that our approximate communication scheme effectively speeds up the total execution time without much loss in quality of the result.