Inline Lossy Compressed MPI Communications in GPU-based Plasma Turbulence Simulations
Jiménez D, Jung F, Schild N, Laukemann J, Pfeiler CM, Dannert T, Schulz M, Laure E (2026)
Publication Type: Conference contribution
Publication year: 2026
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Conference Proceedings Title: PASC 2026 - Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference
Event location: Bern
ISBN: 9798400727344
Abstract
The performance gap between computing power and data movement bandwidth across the HPC hardware stack is one of the primary obstacles to application scaling at exascale. Fusion Plasma simulations are particularly affected by this due to their high-dimensional phase-space representation and communication requirements. This work explores the use of agnostic lossy compression inline with MPI communications as a way to reduce network contention and improve application performance. By striking a balance between compressor throughput, ratio, and fidelity preservation, communication-bound HPC applications could potentially benefit from this data reduction technique. We develop a set of performance models that help determine whether compression libraries provide enough throughput for inline usage. We then evaluate three state-of-the-art lossy compressors with the proposed models: ZFP, SZ and MGARD. Additionally, we illustrate the process of compressing MPI boundary exchanges and analyze the impact of applying lossy reduction in-simulation to target Quantities of Interest in two plasma turbulence applications: GENE and BSL6D. Our main findings show that on both applications, message sizes can be reduced by a factor of 8 while still providing sound physics information and achieving up to 3× and 6× time improvements in boundary exchanges for GENE and BSL6D, respectively.
Authors with CRIS profile
Involved external institutions
Rechenzentrum Garching der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPCDF) / Max Planck Computing & Data Facility
Germany (DE)
Technische Universität München (TUM)
Germany (DE)
Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik / Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (MPG IPP)
Germany (DE)
Germany (DE)
Technische Universität München (TUM)
Germany (DE)
Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik / Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (MPG IPP)
Germany (DE)
How to cite
APA:
Jiménez, D., Jung, F., Schild, N., Laukemann, J., Pfeiler, C.M., Dannert, T.,... Laure, E. (2026). Inline Lossy Compressed MPI Communications in GPU-based Plasma Turbulence Simulations. In PASC 2026 - Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference. Bern, CH: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
MLA:
Jiménez, Diego, et al. "Inline Lossy Compressed MPI Communications in GPU-based Plasma Turbulence Simulations." Proceedings of the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference, PASC 2026, Bern Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2026.
BibTeX: Download