A study of application sensitivity to variation in message-passing latency and bandwidth

✍ Scribed by WORLEY, PATRICK H.; ROBINSON, ALLEN C.; MACKAY, DAVID R.; BARRAGY, EDWARD J.

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 144 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1040-3108
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1096-9128(19980425)10:5<387::aid-cpe324>3.0.co;2-7

✦ Synopsis

This study measures the effects of changes in message latency and bandwidth for productionlevel codes on a current generation tightly coupled MPP, the Intel Paragon. Messages are sent multiple times to study the application sensitivity to variations in bandwidth and latency. This method preserves the effects of contention on the interconnection network.

Two applications are studied: PCTH, a shock physics code developed at Sandia National Laboratories; and PSTSWM, a spectral shallow water code developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. These codes are significant in that PCTH is a 'full physics' application code in production use, while PSTSWM serves as a parallel algorithm test bed and benchmark for production codes used in atmospheric modeling. They are also significant in that the message-passing behavior differs significantly between the two codes, each representing an important class of scientific message-passing applications. ©1998