Performance Prediction of Large Parallel Applications Using Parallel Simulations

Writing parallel applications for computational grids is a challenging task. To achieve good performance, algorithms designed for local area networks must be adapted to the differences in link speeds. An important class of algorithms are collective operations, such as broadcast and reduce. We have developed MAGPIE, a library of collective communication operations optimized for wide area systems. MAGPIEʹS algorithms send the minimal amount of data over the slow wide area links, and only incur a single wide area latency. Using our system, existing MPI applications can be run unmodified on geographically distributed systems. On moderate cluster Qsizes, using a wide area latency of 10 milliseconds and a bandwidth of 1 MByte/s, MAGPIE executes operations up to 10 times faster than MPICH, a widely used MPI implementation; application kernels improve by up to a factor of 4. Due to the structure of our algorithms, MAGPIEʹS advantage increases for higher wide area latencies.