Parallel program analysis on workstation clusters: speedup profiling and latency hiding
Roberto B. Togneri · Concurrency Practice and Experience · 1997
Parallel programming on workstation clusters is subject to many factors and problems which determine the potential success or failure of any individual implementation. The most obvious problems are the difficulty in developing parallel algorithms and the high communication latency which may render such algorithms inefficient. In an attempt to address some of these issues we propose a strategy for estimating the potential speedup of a parallel program based on computation and communication profiling. We show that our proposed strategy yields accurate estimates of the speedup. We also propose a complete communication model so that the speedup can be estimated under different programming inputs and show that moderately accurate estimates can be obtained. High communication latency is the major problem with workstation cluster computing. We attempt to examine this problem from the system level point of view and show experimentally that latency hiding can allow almost full utilisation of the CPU resource even though individual programs may suffer from high communication latencies. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.