DocumentCode :
299720
Title :
Optimizing memory system performance for communication in parallel computers
Author :
Stricker, T. ; Gross, T.
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Comput. Sci., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA
fYear :
1995
fDate :
22-24 June 1995
Firstpage :
308
Lastpage :
319
Abstract :
Communication in a parallel system frequently involves moving data from the memory of one node to the memory of another; this is the standard communication model employed in message passing systems. Depending on the application, we observe a variety of patterns as part of communication steps, e.g., regular (i.e. blocks of data), strided, or irregular (indexed) memory accesses. The effective speed of these communication steps is determined by the network bandwidth and the memory bandwidth, and measurements on current parallel supercomputers indicate that the performance is limited by the memory bandwidth rather than the network bandwidth. Current systems provide a wealth of options to perform communication, and a compiler or user is faced with the difficulty of finding the communication operations that best use the available memory and network bandwidth. This paper provides a framework to evaluate different solutions for inter-node communication and presents the copy-transfer model; this model captures the contributions of the memory system to inter-node communication. We demonstrate the usefulness of this simple model by applying it to two commercial parallel systems, the Cray T3D and the Intel Paragon.
Keywords :
message passing; parallel processing; performance evaluation; Cray T3D; Intel Paragon; communication; copy-transfer model; inter-node communication; memory bandwidth; memory system performance; message passing systems; network bandwidth; parallel computers; performance; Application software; Bandwidth; Buffer storage; Communication standards; Computer science; Concurrent computing; Message passing; Permission; Scattering; System performance;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Computer Architecture, 1995. Proceedings., 22nd Annual International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy
ISSN :
1063-6897
Print_ISBN :
0-89791-698-0
Type :
conf
Filename :
524571
Link To Document :
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