Using communication-to-computation ratio in parallel program design and performance prediction

The authors goal is to be able to predict the performance of a parallel program early in the program development process; to that end they require prediction methods that can be based on incomplete programs. They describe how a single method based on communication-to-computation (C/C) ratio can be used to predict performance accurately and yet fairly simply in some commonly encountered cases. They show how C/C-ratio-based methods are accomplished for both distributed-memory and coherent-memory multiprocessors. They show that focusing on C/C ratio simplifies the use of theory, machine benchmarking and application measurement necessary to provide good parallel performance prediction. In addition, the methods demonstrated are useful because they can be applied to program fragments, or serially executed code