Performance measurement and trace driven simulation of parallel CAD and numeric applications on a hypercube multicomputer

The performance evaluation, workload characterization, and trace-driven simulation of a hypercube multicomputer running realistic workloads are presented. Six representative parallel applications were selected as benchmarks. Software monitoring techniques were then used to collect execution traces. On the basis of the measurement results, the authors investigated both the computation and communication behavior of these parallel programs, including CPU utilization, computation task granularity, message interarrival distribution, the distribution of waiting times in receiving messages, and message length and destination distributions. The localities in communication were also studied. A trace-driven simulation environment was developed to study the behavior of the communication hardware under real workloads. Simulation results on DMA and link utilizations are reported