Communication Characteristics of Message-Passing Scientific and Engineering Applications.
Reza Zamani, Ahmad Afsahi · 2005
Communication performance is an important factor that affects the performance of message-passing parallel applications running on clusters. A proper understanding of communication behaviour of parallel applications will help designing better communication subsystems and MPI libraries in the future. It will also help application developers to maximize their application performance on a target architecture. This paper examines the message passing communication characteristics of three applications (BTMZ, SP-MZ, and LU-MZ) in the NAS Multi-Zone parallel benchmark suite as well as two applications (SPECenv and SPECseis) in the SPEChpc2002 suite. Our study considers both point-to-point and collective communications. For point-to-point communications, we quantify the message type, message frequency, message size, and message destinations. For collectives, we examine their type, frequency, and payload. Our results show that the applications studied have diverse communication patterns and that they are mostly sensitive to the changes in the system size and the problem size. All applications use only a few collective operations, while SPEC applications use them frequently with very large payloads. Overall, our work helps in a better understanding of the communication workloads in the current and emerging parallel applications. Keyword Communication Characteristics, Message-Passing, Parallel Applications, MPI, Clusters