Cray OpenSHMEMX

Cray OpenSHMEMX is a Remote Memory Access (RMA) library. It is a proprietary software implementation of the OpenSHMEM standards specification and released as part of the Cray Programming Environment software package. The Cray OpenSHMEMX software stack is available as a standard compliant software package on different architectures of HPE supercomputer systems.

OpenSHMEM is a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) library interface specification, which is the culmination of a standardization effort among many implementers and users of SHMEM programming model. Refer http://openshmem.org/ for more details on the OpenSHMEM programming model.

SHMEM has a long history as a parallel programming model. It is extensively used since 1993, starting from Cray T3D systems. For the past two decades the SHMEM library implementation in Cray supercomputer systems have evolved through different generations. The current generation of the SHMEM implementation on Cray XC and XK systems is called Cray SHMEM. Cray SHMEM is a proprietary SHMEM implementation from Cray Inc., which is OpenSHMEM standards compliant. The next evolution of OpenSHMEM implementation for current and future generation exascale HPE Cray supercomputer systems is called Cray OpenSHMEMX.

This document contains public announcement information about the Cray OpenSHMEMX software stack including release informations, updated API references, information on performance optimization and tuning parameters, supported environments and systems, and general backward compatibility details.

Overview

Cray OpenSHMEMX software stack provides support for the OpenSHMEM standard specific features as well as implementation-specific features. The examples of the supported features includes teams and library management operations, one-sided data transfer operations including RMA, AMO, and put-with-signal (PWS), collective communication operations, symmetric memory management routines, memory ordering and point-to-point synchronization routines, and support for distributed locks.

All the supported features are accessed using standard OpenSHMEM C and Fortran interfaces. These features are implemented over different transport options like XPMEM, Cross Memory Attach (CMA), Libfabric and DMAPP. While XPMEM and CMA are used for moving data across processing elements within the same node, Libfabric and DMAPP are used to move data across nodes. The SMP transport combines two transports one for inter-node and another for intra-node data transfers. Cray OpenSHMEMX software stack is usable across different HPE system architectures.

Latest News

Latest Release Updates
System Architecture	Release Version	Release Date
HPE Cray EX	Cray OpenSHMEMX v11.7.2	July 2024
HPE Apollo	Cray OpenSHMEMX v11.7.2	July 2024
HPE Cray XC	Cray OpenSHMEMX v9.1.1	August 2020

The following changes were made in the latest release of Cray OpenSHMEMX v11.7.2 on HPE Cray EX and HPE Apollo systems:

Add support for using 4/8 byte puts for application-level signaling
Fix several shmem_quiet flushing issues for default and non-default settings
Fix the implementation of signaling sets to match OSM-1.5 semantics

The following changes were made in the latest release of Cray OpenSHMEMX v9.1.1 on Cray XC systems:

Fix issues in supporting lmod-based cray-openshmemx modules

For more details on the different released versions of Cray OpenSHMEMX, please refer the link.

System Architectures

Cray OpenSHMEMX is supported on HPE Cray EX, HPE Apollo, and HPE Cray XC systems. The current support for Cray OpenSHMEMX on HPE Cray XC systems are in maintenance mode, only bugfixes are provided and no new functional additions are planned. Active functional additions and performance tuning is done on HPE Cray EX and HPE Apollo systems.

The following table shows the availability of Cray OpenSHMEMX on different Cray systems.

Availability of Cray OpenSHMEMX on Different Cray Systems
System Architecture	Processor Type	Availability
HPE Cray EX	x86_64	Available as primary library
HPE Cray EX	aarch64	Available as primary library
HPE Apollo	x86_64	Available as primary library
HPE Cray XC	x86_64	Deprecated support as evaluation library
HPE Cray XC	aarch64	Deprecated support as primary library

Transport Options

The following table shows the support for different transport options in Cray OpenSHMEMX software stack on different system architectures.

Supported Transport Options in Cray OpenSHMEMX
System Architecture	Inter-node Transport Option	Intra-node Transport Option
HPE Cray EX using HPE Slingshot 11 NIC	OFI (cxi provider)	XPMEM and SSHEAP (default) / CMA
HPE Cray EX using HPE Slingshot 10 NIC (Ethernet)	OFI (verbs;ofi_rxm provider)	XPMEM and SSHEAP (default) / CMA
HPE Apollo using NVidia Inifiniband	OFI (verbs;ofi_rxm provider)	XPMEM and SSHEAP (default) / CMA
HPE Cray XC using Aries-Interconnect	DMAPP	XPMEM

Publications/Reference

The proper citation of Cray OpenSHMEMX software stack is: Naveen Namashivayam, Bob Cernohous, Dan Pou, and Mark Pagel, “OpenSHMEM 2018: Fifth Workshop on OpenSHMEM and Related Technologies.” Baltimore, MD, August, 2018. “Introducing Cray OpenSHMEMX- A Modular Multi-Communication Layer OpenSHMEM Implementation.”

The corresponding Bibtex is:

@inproceedings{naveen:openshmem:2018:crayopenshmemx,
    author = {Naveen Namashivayam and Bob Cernohous and Dan Pou and Mark
              Pagel},
    title  = {Introducing Cray OpenSHMEMX - A Modular Multi-Communication
              Layer OpenSHMEM Implementation},
    booktitle = {OpenSHMEM 2018: Fifth Workshop on OpenSHMEM and
              Related Technologies},
    month = Aug,
    year = {2018},
    location = {Baltimore, MD, USA},
}

Note

This website is in construction and updated regularly. There are place-holders for various pages and will be completed soon.

Cray OpenSHMEMX Manpage