Parallel Performance Project Research Paper

Research Paper

Modeling the Communication Performance of the IBM SP2
Gheith A. Abandah and Edward S. Davidson
To appear in the Proceedings of the 10th International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS'96), pp 249-257, April 1996.

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to develop models that characterize the communication performance of a message-passing multicomputer by taking the IBM SP2 as a case study. The paper evaluates and models the three aspects of the communication performance: scheduling overhead, message-passing time, and synchronization overhead. Performance models are developed for the basic communication patterns, enabling the estimation of the communication times of a message-passing application. Such estimates facilitate activities such as application tuning, selection of the best available implementation technique, and performance comparisons among different multicomputers.