Multiprocessor scalability predictions through detailed program execution analysis
Xiaodong Zhang, Zhichen Xu · 1995
Scalability measures the ability of a parallel system to improve performance as the size of an application problem and the number of processors involved increase. There are some limits to existing scalability studies. First, the problem size in a computation is not well-defined. Second, the methods used to differentiate algorithmic and architectural scalabilities are not effective enough. Thirdly, most approaches to scalability study are either highly time-consuming or restricted to simple problem/architecture structures. A major effort of this work is to address these limits. We have extended the latency metric [11] for more complex scaling of problems, and to possibly isolate the scalability of an algorithm from a parallel system. The scalability prediction is based on a semi-empirical approach [10] that significantly reduces the time and cost of measurements and simulation. Our prediction results were validated on the KSR-1 and on the CM-5. 1 Introduction There are some limits to ...