Performance modeling of heterogeneous systems

Predicting how well applications may run on modern systems is becoming increasingly challenging. It is no longer sufficient to look at number of floating point operations and communication costs, but one also needs to model the underlying systems and how their topology, heterogeneity, system loads, etc, may impact performance. This work focuses on developing a practical model for heterogeneous computing by looking at the older BSP model, which attempts to model communication costs on homogeneous systems, and looks at how its library implementations can be extended to include a run-time system that may be useful for heterogeneous systems. Our extensions of BSPlib with MPI and GASnet mechanisms at the communication layer should provide useful tools for evaluating applications with respect to how they may run on heterogeneous systems.