Modeling the communication performance of the IBM SP2

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.