Machine Abstractions and Locality Issues in Studying Parallel Systems
Anand Sivasubramaniam, Aman Singla, Umakishore Ramachandran, H. Venkateswaran · 1993
We define a set of overhead functions that capture the salient artifacts representing the interaction between parallel application characteristics and architectural features. An execution-driven simulation testbed is used to separate these overheads in a parallel system. Using this testbed and a set of applications, we address two important issues. The first concerns the use of machine abstractions for performance studies of parallel systems. The second deals with quantifying the impact of locality on the performance of applications. The key conclusions from this study are that the newly proposed model LogP is an effective one for abstracting the network, and that ignoringlocality can significantly affect the application performance.