Performance prediction tools for Cedar
Walid Abu-Sufah, Alex Y. Kwok · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1985
The development of performance prediction tools for highspeed machine organizations has been recognized as a key problem facing the research community in parallel computing [BrAI84].This paper presents a survey of the tools which has been developed for performance prediction of the Cedar multiproce~or supercomputer of the University of Illinois.The system is deterministic, modular, and automatic.The hierarchical organization of the system provides the user with the ability to choose from a set of alternatives for predicting the performance with different levels of accuracy and cost.Using 22 programs, we measure the performance degradation due to conflicts in the shared memory, delay in the Cedar interconnection network, and synchronization overhead.The results confirm that the architecture of Cedar as detailed in [GLYZ84] is balanced.The performance of the Cedar interconnectiou network is very close to a crossbar.Synchronization overhead and shared memory conflicts could degrade performance for some programs considerably.