Parallel Performance Project Research Paper

Research Paper

Modeling the Communication and Computation Performance of the IBM SP2
Gheith Abandah and Edward S. Davidson
Technical Report CSE-TR-258-95, University of Michigan, May 95.

Abstract

The objective of this report is to develop models that characterize the performance of the different aspects of a multicomputer to facilitate activities such as explaining the achieved performance of message-passing applications, developing efficient message-passing applications, and comparing the performance of different multicomputers and application code implementations. The models developed in this report estimate the execution time of a message-passing application given its high-level source code. In this report, we present our models for characterizing the communication and computation performance of multicomputers. Our approach in developing communication performance models is to model the performance of a set of common communication patterns. This set contains the basic communication patterns, and is selected in such a way that the complex communication patterns can be constructed from these basic patterns. Hence the time of a complex communication pattern is estimated by summing the times of its basic components. Our approach for modeling the computation performance is through using a Machine-Application Performance Bound (MA Bound). The MA Bound of an application is an upper bound for the performance that can be achieved for the application on a certain machine. In this report we present our models for the IBM SP1, IBM SP2, and Convex SPP-1000. And we present some uses of these models, e.g. studying the performance of six broadcast algorithms on the IBM SP2, and comparing the communication performance of the IBM SP2 and the Convex SPP-1000.