Analysis of cost of performing communications using various communication mechanisms

There is a trend towards incorporating architectural features which support mechanisms for efficiently communicating long messages and (fixed-size) short messages. In this paper, we provide a framework for analyzing the communication costs in parallel machines which provide various communication mechanisms. First, we define four parameters to accurately model the communication time in these parallel machines. Then, we study the suitability of various mechanisms for performing basic communication operations. Finally, three problems which have very different communication requirements are used as examples to demonstrate the usefulness of our framework in understanding the impact of these communication mechanisms on the communication cost